Ports in a Storm
by Zubeneschamali
Summary: COMPLETE. A suspected smuggling operation leads to a case that even Charlie's math skills can't handle. Will he go too far trying to help solve it, especially once Don gets in over his head? Numb3rs Awards Round One winner for Case-Related.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Ports in a Storm

Author: Zubeneschamali

Rating: T (language, violence)

Summary: A suspected smuggling operation leads to a case that even Charlie's math skills can't handle. Will he go too far trying to help solve it, especially once Don gets in over his head?

Author's notes: Many thanks to Susan for her excellent beta reading and for helping me identify the missing ingredient. Also thanks to N. for help with the math. Any errors that remain are my own.

For those of you who asked for a sequel to "Someone to Watch Over Me"… this isn't it, but it's the best you're going to get. :)

Disclaimer: The characters here are not mine (except the ones you don't recognize!), but the property of Cheryl Heuton, Nick Falacci, and the good folks at CBS. I promise to put them back when I'm done playing with them.

oooooooooooooooo

Chapter 1  
Monday, June 13, 2005  
9:45 P.M.  
Port of Long Beach, Pier K

"Are you and the customs guys ready, Don?" a quiet voice buzzed into his ear.

"Yeah," he replied, pressing against his headpiece to make David's words clearer as he looked out across the dark water. "Looks like the crew is almost finished tying up the ship."

"All right," came David's response from where he was stationed on the other side of the harbor, keeping watch for the ship they had been expecting. Now, that large ship was gently bobbing up and down in the water in front of Don, full of the forty-foot-long metal boxes called containers that were to be offloaded onto semi-trucks and railroad cars for their journey to various destinations across the country. "This is definitely the right one: the 'Buir Lake.'"

"Yeah, I see the name." Don twiddled the focus knob on his binoculars. The overhead lights, high on top of the huge cranes that were used for unloading the container ships, made it possible to read the lettering on the cargo freighter a hundred yards away. "Hey, does that say Mongolia?"

There was a pause. Then David's voice crackled through the earpiece, "Yeah, it does. Does Mongolia even have a coastline?"

"No, it's between China and Russia. I guess if Switzerland can have a navy, Mongolia can have cargo ships."

Someone tapped Don on the shoulder. He turned his head to see Jason Ramos, the senior customs official for the port. "Hang on, David." Twisting the mouthpiece slightly to the side, he asked, "What's up?"

The short, dark-haired man said, "We're ready to go when you are. Once the gangplank is down, the ship is ready for boarding, and it looks like they're about to lower it."

"All right. You hear that, David?"

"Copy. We'll keep an eye on things from here."

"All right, see you in a bit." Don turned his attention to Ramos. "Are your men ready?"

"The men and the dogs, yes, we are. You're sure about this tip of yours?"

"He hasn't failed us in the past." Don paused to check the clip on his gun. "Last time it was a million dollars of marijuana, hidden inside a shipment of fresh flowers from Peru. He didn't say what was in this one, but with the Asian origin, I'd expect heroin.'

"Well, our dogs are the best trained on the West Coast. If there's anything on that ship, they'll find it."

Don nodded. "All right then, let's do it."

Two hours later, Don was frustrated beyond belief. The Filipino crew claimed to know not a word of either English or Spanish, which made communication more than a little difficult. Once they understood that the customs inspection was not optional, however, they largely stayed out of the way. He was astonished that it only took six men to run the massive ship. But then, the loading and unloading was all done by crane, and it wasn't like there was much to manage once the vessel was underway.

And there wasn't much for the FBI or Customs to manage, either. The dogs had sniffed every container they could access, and had come up empty. Ramos had assured him the animals could smell contraband not only through the steel walls of the containers, but up to 150 feet away. Don had watched the ship's captain shuffle his feet nervously a few times when the dogs neared the bow of the ship, but the animals never signalled that they had found anything.

"Looks like a bust," Ramos said, coming up to where Don stood leaning against the ship's rail with his arms folded.

"I can't believe it. I've gotten tips from Everett half a dozen times, and they've always been reliable. We must be missing something." He'd contacted David over the radio, but nothing was being dropped overboard to avoid detection. Whatever the illegal cargo was, it was still on the ship. If it was there at all.

"Not to put too much emphasis on the canines, Agent Eppes, but if they haven't found any drugs, then there's none to be found." Ramos looked over at where his men were leading the dogs around the boxes and coming up empty. "Anonymous tips aren't always the best way of getting information, you know. I did a six-month stint in a couple of Japanese ports in a kind of an exchange program a couple of years ago. You'd be amazed at how few anonymous tips they get. Fear of the _yakuza_. Means they have to do their work the old-fashioned way."

"Yeah, I understand the Japanese mafia are a force to be reckoned with." Don frowned as he looked off the side of the ship. Then he suddenly looked up at the customs agent. "What if it's not drugs?"

Ramos spread his hands wide. "Then it could be anything. Endangered species, bootleg videos, cigarettes…we see it all."

"Yeah, but most of those, the dogs would notice, right?" When Ramos nodded, Don went on, "What kinds of things that get smuggled don't have a scent, but are fairly high-value for their size?"

"Anything that's smuggled is high-value for its size, or it wouldn't be worth the risk. Agent Eppes, we can't go looking through random containers and hope to find something. There's nearly a thousand of them on this ship. I'm sorry, but we don't have the manpower to do that detailed a search on the basis of one tip, no matter how reliable your source usually is. We keep asking for more money and men from Homeland Security, and they keep sending us squat."

"Yeah, I understand." Don let out a frustrated sigh. His gaze wandered toward the ship's captain, who looked more relaxed than he had a couple of hours ago. Then he looked thoughtfully toward the bow. "Do me a favor?"

Ramos sighed. "This whole night's been a favor."

"And I appreciate it, believe me. But could you check inside a couple of the containers closest to the bow? Captain Balandra there gets a little twitchy whenever someone gets too close to them."

The Customs agent checked his watch. "In half an hour I'll have to start paying overtime, and I can't afford to do that. With the four men I have, that'll probably get us through eight, maybe ten boxes."

Don echoed the man's earlier gesture, spreading his hands apart. "If you don't find anything in half an hour, we'll call it a night."

As the customs officers started moving towards the ship's bow in response to Ramos's commands, Don nodded at Terry, who was watching the captain from off to his side. She moved away from the railing where she had been leaning, ready to move if necessary.

As the first container was opened, Don noticed Balandra stiffen, and the first officer who had been standing beside him began to move towards the interior of the ship. Don casually strolled forward, keeping one eye on the man and one eye on the customs agents.

Two containers had been opened with no results, but the Filipinos only grew more tense. Then the first officer stepped inside the bridge, and the captain followed. Don signaled to Terry, and she moved away from the rail, calling out to the two men to stay where they were.

Don had long remembered his instructors at Quantico telling him that FBI work was hours of patient waiting and preparation leading up to a few critical moments of furious activity. They had been proven right many times in his experience. All of a sudden, tonight was another one of those times.

A shout came from the bow of the ship. Don turned to look, and saw one of the customs officials signaling Ramos. He swiveled back towards the bridge in time to see the captain drawing a gun and aiming at the woman behind him. His heart leapt into his throat. "Terry, get down!"

She ducked as the bullet whistled over her head. Don had already drawn his weapon and pointed it at the two men, one of whom was doing something inside the bridge with a pile of papers. "Drop it, now!" he shouted.

Gunshots to his right drew his attention. Two other crew members had come out from belowdeck and were firing on the customs officers. One fell back against the side of the ship, then another. Ramos and the three remaining agents were pinned down behind a stack of containers.

"All agents up here, now!" Don barked into his headset. "You, don't move!" he snapped at the ship's captain, who still has his pistol out.

The captain hesitated. Then there was a small flash and a loud bang from within the bridge, and the first officer came stumbling out.

Don started forward, keeping his gun aimed at Balandra. "Drop it!" The captain exchanged a glance with his first officer, then lowered his weapon. Apparently some things translated just fine. "Terry, you all right?"

She had already stood up and was pointing her own weapon at Balandra. "Yeah, he missed me."

"All right, take care of the two of them." Don darted toward the ship's bow, taking cover behind a stack of containers. Heavy footsteps on the gangplank told him the rest of the team was on their way. He leaned forward and squeezed off a shot at the crewman he could see who was still firing at the customs officers. The man went down with a cry, his gun discharging harmlessly into the air.

"Don, where do you want us?" David had come up behind him, followed by two more agents.

"Adams, you help Lake secure the captain and first officer. Sinclair and Gutierrez, you come with me."

In a matter of minutes, they had subdued the other armed man and located the rest of the crew, both of whom were hiding unarmed belowdeck. One of the customs officers who'd been shot was dead. Don called in the paramedics for the other officer and the man he had shot, both of whom were only slightly wounded.

When all the action had died down, Don wandered over to where Jason Ramos was standing, sorting through the contents of the container that they'd been searching when all hell broke loose. "So what have you got there, anyway?"

The shorter man indicated a stack of boxes inside the large metal container, each of which were as tall as he was. "Take a look."

Don peered inside and saw "N20" stamped on all of the boxes. One had been opened to reveal a row of tall metal cylinders with valves on the top. Instead of the same chemical symbol that was on the outside of the box, the tanks read, "CFC-12." "What kind of gas is that?"

"Chlorofluorocarbon-12," Ramos explained. "One of the compounds better known as freon."

Don stared at him. "Freon? These guys are willing to kill people to smuggle in the stuff that goes in your air conditioner?"

"The stuff that used to go in your air conditioner. For the past ten years, it's been illegal to produce. Breaks down the ozone layer." He made a vague gesture towards the sky. "Of course, older machinery still uses it, so there's a huge black market." At Don's shake of his head, he shrugged. "I told you, we see it all."

"Yeah, I guess you do." He turned to David. "Merrick's going to love this."

"Next time, don't promise him a drug bust when you don't know what the cargo is ahead of time," the younger agent said.

"Yeah, yeah. All right people, let's get our guests here rounded up. Gutierrez, call ahead and see if we can round up a Tagalog interpreter this time of night, in case the crew really doesn't understand Spanish. We're gonna figure out why these guys were so eager to defend a cargo of chlorofluoro--whatever the hell this stuff is."

Personally, he couldn't wait to find out what a Los Angeles customs official getting killed by a Filipino sailor on a Mongolian-registered ship had to do with a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. "It's a small world after all," Don muttered, following his team off the "Buir Lake."


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer and beta thanks in the first chapter.

Thank to everyone who reviewed. More, please!

oooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 2  
Tuesday, June 14, 2005  
7:10 A.M.  
FBI field office, Los Angeles

After a short night's sleep, Don was back at the office. The other agents on his team had had Monday off in anticipation of the expected bust and the ensuing long night, but Don had already put in a full day's work before going to the port. So as much as he had wanted to get in on the initial interrogations, he knew he'd be better off with at least a few hours of sleep behind him.

His first stop was the sailors they'd apprehended. Entering one of the outer interrogation rooms, he asked, "What've you got, David?"

The younger agent turned off the speaker transmitting the conversation from the other side of the one-way mirror. "Nothing yet. We've been taking turns on him all night, and he won't say a word."

Don cast a glance through the glass at the short, brown-skinned man seated in a folding chair, his cuffed hands resting on the table in front of him. His fatigue showed in his slumped posture. "Has the good captain remembered his English?"

"Yeah, Balandra suddenly 'remembered' his second language when they got him back here. So did the rest of the crew, but we're interrogating them separately."

"Yeah, I know, I already looked in on the first officer. He hasn't said a word, either, but Adams thinks it'll just take time."

"Not this guy." David shook his head. "He's refusing to speak. He's afraid of something, or someone."

"I take it you've offered him protection?"

"Once we figured out that was his problem. But he says he doesn't believe us. I can give it another try, though."

"Nah, the guy's exhausted. So are you. Let him get some sleep and eat something. If he thinks we're taking good care of him, maybe he'll trust us."

"All right, I'll do that."

"And then you take care of yourself, too, okay? Get some food and some rest."

He moved on to the other interrogation rooms, informing each of the agents to take a break, for themselves and their subjects. No one had had any more luck than David, though it was fairly obvious that the four regular crew members didn't know much of what was going on anyway. It was all going to have to come from the captain and the first officer.

Don's next stop, after pouring himself a cup of coffee, was the forensics lab. He had poured out a second cup, adding enough cream to turn the dark black liquid a pale tan, and he juggled both styrofoam cups as he opened the door.

"Hey, Andrea, thanks for coming in so early. I know it's hard when you have two kids to get out the door." He held the cup out as an offering.

The blond agent looked up at him through her bangs. "Yeah, but at least John wasn't on call last night, so he was able to get them to school." She took the cup from his hand. "The color looks right, Eppes, but that better be strong coffee."

"I think David made it, so you can probably stand a spoon up in it if you want."

She took a sip of the hot beverage and smiled. "Okay, this'll keep me going for a little while."

Don sat down on one of the stools beside the lab bench next to his longtime friend and former Quantico classmate. "So, what have you been able to put together?"

"Well, you probably already knew that the documents we recovered from the bridge were pretty much burned to a crisp." When he nodded, she went on, "It looks like they were written on something like flash paper. When you saw the first officer go inside, and then there was the flash and the bang, he was setting them on fire."

"Why didn't we see any flames?"

"Flash paper burns instantly: no smoke, no flame. It's used in magic tricks or theater special effects, as well as in fireworks. It's not usually used for ship's manifests."

"They wrote their manifest on flash paper?"

"Actually, on regular paper that they chemically treated to act like flash paper. The only reason I figured it out is that it burned so hot, so fast, it left an imprint on the papers below it without doing more than singeing them. You can barely make out some of the words." She lifted a piece of paper with tweezers and laid it under Don's nose.

The paper was charred, all right, and the document that looked like a map of the port was overlaid with some words that Don couldn't even begin to make out. "You can read that?"

"A few words." She pointed with the tweezers. "This says 'electronics,' that one says 'chemicals.' Give me a few more hours and I'll have the rest of the list."

Don squinted at the black and gray mess on the paper. "You're pretty good, Sayers, if you can read any of that."

"You know I am." She shot him a smug grin. "Actually, I'm cheating a little. The two gentlemen belowdecks were trying to destroy another manifest when your team caught them. Some of it was lost, but we managed to recover about half of it. I'm guessing the one in the bridge was for Customs, but the one down in the hold was the real manifest."

"And they had to destroy both so any discrepancies wouldn't be noticed, like whether it was nitrous oxide or CFC-12 in a certain container of gas cylinders."

"Exactly."

He nodded. "Good work, Andrea. I think you earned that," and he gestured at the coffee, quirking the corner of his mouth.

She rolled her eyes at him. "I think I earned a double whip raspberry latte, but I don't see one on my desk, do you?"

"Well, keep at it and you never know what might appear later in the morning." Don swung himself off the stool. "Seriously, thanks. This is a great start. Now it's time to figure out the 'street value' of what we've got."

"Why the air quotes?"

"I still find it hard to believe that we're talking about the street value of freon. It's like smuggling helium or something."

"Except helium isn't damaging to the environment, nor is its production outlawed in the developed world."

He dropped back onto the lab stool. "Okay, enlighten me, Sierra Club girl."

Andrea grimaced. "I wrote a paper on the Montreal Protocol in college. That was the international agreement that banned the substances that are destroying the ozone layer. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, like freon are the worst. Two American scientists won the Nobel Prize for proving in the 1970s that these chemicals were contributing to the hole in the ozone over Antarctica. After their results were published, it only took thirteen years to get an international treaty signed."

"Only thirteen years?"

"Hey, that's fast. Look at global warming. Anyway, the production of these chemicals was to be phased out over a certain number of years. In the meantime, any of the substance that still exists can be recycled and used again. But since 1995, CFCs can't be produced in the U.S. or any other developed nation."

"It sounds like there's a catch." Don drained the last of the coffee from his cup, grimacing at the lukewarm temperature of the liquid.

She nodded. "The Montreal Protocol allowed for the developing nations of the world to delay implementation because they can't afford the costs of switching to new chemicals as easily. Until 2010, they can still manufacture CFCs. But there's still plenty of old air conditioners and refrigerators in this country that use freon. So Russia and China produce the stuff, and it gets smuggled over here to fill the demand."

"How pervasive a problem is it?"

"It's the second most lucrative product to be smuggled into the U.S., at least at some ports. The highest amount captured at a time is 1.6 million dollars."

Don whistled. "So where's the 'Just Say No to Freon' campaign?"

The corner of her mouth turned up. "It's not something individual consumers would buy, but industrial users. A tank of the chemical won't do you any good unless you know exactly what you're doing."

"Well, that gives us a place to start. We need to check out all the refrigerator and A/C repair shops in greater L.A. Presumably these guys weren't going to hang out a sign and announce that they had some freon for sale. We've got to find where their market is, their distribution network."

"Good luck with that." Andrea turned back to her microscope. "Me, I'll stick to the material evidence and not the messy parts like actually catching the bad guys."

"All right, I'll see you later."

He made his way back towards his desk, mentally reviewing his list of people. The interrogation, done. The forensics, done. As the elevator doors opened and he stepped out, lost in his mental list, he almost bumped into someone standing there. "Oh, excuse me," he said. Then he recognized the tall woman with the long, golden hair. "Dr. Fisher?"

Karen Fisher turned, and a small smile lit her face when she saw him. "Agent Eppes! How are you?"

"I'm fine," he replied. "How about you? You doing okay?"

"Oh, I'm fine," she said dismissively. "I'm back to my regular schedule at the clinic. I think a lot of patients were happy to find that their cancelled appointments reappeared all of a sudden."

"Yeah, I bet they were." He looked at her more closely. She seemed tired. The emerald green shirt she was wearing brought out her deep green eyes, but that only served to highlight the shadows underneath them.

"So, um, how are you?" she asked, gesturing at his arm. "You got that looked at, right?"

"Oh, yeah, it was just a scratch." He waved it off. "So, are you here to meet with someone?" Smooth, Eppes, he said to himself. No, she's just hanging out here because she doesn't have enough to do after being in witness protection for a week.

"Yes, an Agent Sinclair, I think it was. There was some kind of paperwork I had to fill out after, well, you know." She trailed off at the end, looking away as she did so.

"Right. Listen, I'm sorry, but we had something big come up last night, and David's not available right now. I'd help you out, but I'm kind of in the middle of it."

"Oh. Well, that's okay. I can come back another time." Karen took a step backwards towards the elevators. Looking at her, Don realized the vivaciousness and energy that she had projected in her office was missing. This Dr. Fisher was a far quieter, less assertive woman.

He took her elbow and steered her to the side of the hallway, away from the traffic hurrying back and forth. "Karen, are you sure you're okay?"

She had flinched a little when he laid his hand on her. Cursing himself for not thinking of that, he quickly pulled his hand away. But all she said was, "Yeah, I'm fine. I know you're busy, so -- "

He stepped a little closer and held his hands up in front of him. "Just hear me out, okay?" She nodded, and he went on in a low tone, "I don't want to pry, but have you talked to anyone about what happened with McDowd?"

She looked down, her honey-blond hair forming a curtain that shielded the sides of her face. "I'm fine, really. And I thought I couldn't talk about an active case, anyway."

"We have people here that are trained for that, you know," he continued in as soothing of a tone as he could. "Or, if you want to talk about it, I already know what happened, so it's not like you'd have to tell the whole story again…" He trailed off hesitantly, not sure if his concern was welcome or not.

Karen looked back up, and he was struck by the intensity of the emotions in her green eyes. He'd read her correctly. Now the only question was, would she go along with it?

"If it's not too much trouble…" she hesitantly started.

He gave her a warm smile. "Not at all. Just think of it as a follow-up visit." She did smile at that, and he relaxed. "Can you come by again on Thursday? I'll go over the paperwork with you, and we can grab lunch afterwards."

"I'll have to check my schedule, but I think that would be fine." She gave him another, less tentative smile. "I really appreciate this, Agent Eppes."

"Please -- it's Don," he said.

"All right." She reached behind her to press the button for the elevator, which instantly opened up. "I'll see you on Thursday, then."

"Take care," he said, watching her until the doors closed.

He strolled back to his desk, lost in thought. Cooper had given him a hard time when he'd been here a couple of weeks ago, observing archly that he didn't remember Don making so many personal visits to a witness in the past, but then maybe they hadn't had such good-looking women to protect, either. He'd laughed it off, reminding his former partner that getting involved with a witness was a bad idea for any number of reasons, and the teasing had subsided.

But Karen wasn't his witness to protect anymore.

"Don!"

Terry's voice interrupted his train of thought. She was hanging up the phone at his desk, and he hurried over. "What is it?"

"Your caller ID said it was the Customs office at Long Beach so I picked it up. Paul Everett, your tipster at the port? He's dead."

"What? What happened?"

"A longshoreman found him in one of the Long Beach warehouses this morning. One shot to the temple, very professional."

"Crap." He rubbed his temples with one hand, all thoughts of Karen Fisher suddenly gone. "That makes it a whole lot more serious. As if a dead Customs agent wasn't bad enough."

Terry nodded grimly. " Whoever is behind this knows an awful lot, if they know how we found out about the contraband and were able to act on it so quickly."

"Maybe Balantra's right to be scared," Don mused. "If our informants have become compromised somehow, who knows what else has?" He sighed. "I'd better spread the word. So much for a break on the interrogations. We need some answers, and we need them now."


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Chapter 1.

Thanks for all of your reviews! It took me a few months to put this story together, so it's nice to know that it's appreciated. You might have guessed by now that this is a Don-centered story, but the Charlie-lovers out there should be happy with the next couple of chapters.

ooooooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 3  
Thursday, June 16, 2005  
9:35 A.M.  
Math building, CalSci

"Yo, Charlie." Don rapped on the door as he stuck his head inside his brother's office. "You busy?"

The curly-haired mathematician looked up from his desk, where he was buried behind stacks of blue books. "Kind of, yes. Is it urgent?"

Don gestured at the piles of exam books. "Grading finals?"

"Just compiling the scores. Grades are due tomorrow, and I spent Sunday golfing with Dad instead of grading." He paged through one of the books, squinted into the distance for a moment, and wrote down a number in red ink on the front. "Ouch. They are not doing well."

"Wrote a final that was too hard, did you?" Don entered the office and closed the door behind him, crossing the room to sit on a chair in front of the professor's desk.

Charlie looked at him from under his eyebrows before flipping through another blue book. "I do not write tests that are too hard. I have some students who fail to take them seriously." He punctuated his statement by circling the 65 that he had written on the cover.

"Oh, is that it," Don replied knowingly.

"It's the same test I gave last quarter, plus or minus a few questions. And I taught the class the same way. Students vary from class to class. It's just regression towards the mean." He summed another score and wrote down. Don watched as he looked at the student's name, and then broke into a grin. "Good job, Sara," Charlie murmured. "That'll get you your A."

"You keep track of everyone's grade like that?" Don wasn't sure why he was asking; Charlie could juggle dozens of pieces of information in his head at once without dropping any of them. But it made him wonder if all professors whizzed through the grading of final exams so quickly, especially those not as mathematically gifted as Professor Eppes.

"You'd be surprised how little difference the final makes in determining overall grades. Larry keeps threatening to secretly assign grades in the last week of class and just toss everyone's final in the recycling bin."

Don raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that a little unfair to the students? What if they study their butts off for the final?"

"Or what if they get their siblings to explain to them the physics that they blew off for the entire semester?" The corners of Charlie's mouth were twitching as he spoke.

"Hey, I took that final and got a B on it all by myself, thank you very much." Don glared at his younger brother. "If I'd had Larry for a professor, you're telling me I would have been stuck with a D for the class."

"Larry doesn't actually do that, it's just an observation about the likelihood of students changing their ways at the end of the term. Besides, how much do you remember about mechanics or E&M?"

"I know an object can't be in two places at one time." Don lifted the file folder he'd been holding. "Beyond that, I need your help."

"Someone's violating the basic laws of physics?"

"More like someone's tampering with evidence." He dropped the folder on top of one of the stacks of blue books. "We're trying to trace the route of a container ship that docked at Long Beach on Monday night with some contraband. We know all the places where they picked up legitimate cargo, but not where they got the illegal stuff. We've contacted ports around the Pacific Rim, but we're not having much luck. Either they have no record because their computer crashed, or the ship is recorded as being in two places on the same day, or there's some other 'coincidental' snafu."

Charlie had opened the folder and was paging through the documents: the ship's manifest, and the small bits of information they'd managed to gather from the major Asian ports in the last 36 hours. "You don't think they're coincidental."

"Well, we already know whoever's behind this has a long reach." When Charlie looked up, he went on, "They killed the informant who tipped us off. Within 12 hours of the bust."

Charlie gave a low whistle. "That's a little scary."

"Yeah, tell me about it. So what we need is to figure out the order in which the ship visited all of the ports, in order to see if there's any extra time in there where they might have slipped into another destination, and where that might be."

Charlie nodded, but didn't reply.

Then his last words registered with Don. Was that his brother's way of trying to tell him something? "Uh, you know, if you're too busy with your finals, I could come back in a couple of days."

"No, it's okay." Charlie waved at him to stay put.

"Seriously, if it's too much for you. I mean, it is pretty unnerving about Everett." At Charlie's quizzical look, he explained, "Our informant. I completely understand if you don't want to get involved."

"Don, it's not that." He shrugged and returned to his perusal of the file. "I trust that you wouldn't do anything to put me in danger."

Well, that was more confidence than Don had in himself, he thought as he stared at the top of his brother's curly head. It had become so easy so quickly to rely on Charlie and forget that he wasn't a trained FBI agent. But the sniper had reminded him of that with horrifying clarity.

He'd chewed out David but good for bringing a civilian into the line of fire. They both understood that Don wouldn't have been so furious if it was just any civilian, though it was still the younger agent's error. If Terry hadn't been called out of town for the past few weeks to consult on a case, he would have preferred that Sinclair stay out of his way. As it was, he knew that David was shaken enough by the incident that it wouldn't happen again.

And if Don had anything to say about it, Charlie would never be in the line of fire again. Which meant it was a dumb idea for him to have come here. "Maybe you shouldn't be consulting on this one until we have a better idea who we're dealing with."

Charlie was shaking his head. "You don't have to worry about that."

"Yes, I do, Charlie. You just told me you trust me to keep you out of danger, and I – "

He raised a hand to cut him off. "Don, you don't have to worry about it because I can't help you. I can't do what you're asking. I'm sorry." He closed the folder and laid it down on top of the exam books.

"What do you mean, you can't do it?" Don didn't understand what he was hearing. His brother could always do the math.

Charlie sighed. "What you're asking me to do is a variation of the traveling salesman problem."

"The what?"

As Charlie rose to his feet and crossed the room to the chalkboard, Don wondered if he was capable of explaining anything mathematical without a marker or a piece of chalk in his hand. "Say a salesman leaves home, and he has to visit a certain number of cities on his trip." He drew five large dots on the board. "There's a certain travel cost between each pair of cities." He chose one dot and drew lines from it to each of the other four, writing in a number on each of the lines between 0 and 10. Then he repeated the process for each dot, creating an intricate web of lines and numbers spanning the chalkboard. "The goal of the salesman, of course, is to visit each city while minimizing his total travel cost. And there's a certain order in which he has to visit the cities to make that happen."

Don stared at the diagram for a moment. "But the cities that are closest to each other aren't always the cheapest to travel between, because a pair that aren't adjacent might be connected by a freeway or a direct flight or something."

"That's right. That's what these weights indicate." Charlie pointed at the numbers he had assigned to each line. "For your container ship, the weights might include the time it takes to clear customs, or how long it has to wait for a berth to open up at a port. Even if the ports are all in a straight line up and down the coast, a linear order doesn't necessarily make the most sense."

He almost understood what his brother was trying to teach him, but there was still something missing. "But we're not interested in how much it cost the 'Buir Lake' to get from China or Singapore or wherever to Long Beach, just where it stopped along the way."

"But 'cost' can mean many things, not all of them monetary. These numbers -- " he tapped the board -- "can mean time as well as money. In this case, we know the total travel time, based on when the ship last left Los Angeles and when it arrived at Long Beach. Based on the cost in travel time between those ports, there should be a unique solution to the traveling salesman problem that would tell us in what order it visited the ports. Unfortunately, I can't come up with that solution."

Don frowned. "It seems like it would be easy. I mean, if I can understand the problem, it can't be too complicated, right?"

Charlie gave him a rueful grin. "Neither is Fermat's Last Theorem, and that took over three hundred years to prove. For only a few cities, it's fairly trivial to solve, but the number of possibilities goes up at a frighteningly rapid rate as you add more locations."

"Yeah, but there's fewer than forty places the ship could have gone. Can't you, what do you call it, use brute force?" It always sounded strange when Charlie used the terminology of physical violence to talk about calculating numbers. But then, he supposed that to a mathematician, that's what running a bunch of numbers without any kind of elegant equation was: a form of violence.

Charlie grimaced. "Not exactly. Say there were only twenty ports to consider. The number of possible combinations is…" He snatched up the chalk and started writing on the board. "Assuming your starting point is fixed, it's n-1 factorial. Normally, I'd divide it by two, but the travel cost might not be the same in each direction, so it's asymmetric."

He thought about it for a moment as Charlie scribbled. "Because the time it takes to go from, say, Shanghai to Seoul might take longer than Seoul to Shanghai, if there's a longer customs line at Seoul or something."

His brother shot him a grin. "That's good, Don. You're picking this up faster than a lot of my students would."

"I'm twice as old as your students," he huffed. "I have a little more experience at figuring things out. And don't you say anything." He pointed his finger at Charlie as he saw the mathematician's mouth open with what was no doubt a rude comment about his age.

Charlie spread his hands wide and gave Don an innocent look before returning to the board. "As I was saying, n-1 factorial. That's nineteen times eighteen times seventeen, all the way down." He thought for a moment, scribbled a few numbers off to the side, and then wrote 60,822,550,200,000,000 on the board.

Don shook his head. No matter how many times he saw that internal calculator of his brother's in action, it still amazed him. So did the number he had written. "That's how many possible routings there are? That's huge!"

"On a supercomputer that could check a million routes per second, that would take, um, 77,000 years. And that's only twenty cities, not forty."

"Crap."

Charlie gave a simple nod in response.

"Isn't there some kind of equation you can come up with, some kind of shortcut?"

"I knew you were going to ask that." He shook his head regretfully. "No, I can't. And you know why?"

Don raised his eyebrows in query.

Charlie tossed the chalk onto the rail. "This is P vs. NP, Don. The traveling salesman problem is a classic example of an NP-hard problem. I can't solve it – because no one can. I can run some branch-and-bound algorithms and try to at least narrow down the possibilities for you, but I'm afraid that's it."

Don rubbed a hand over his face. "I suppose I know better than to ask you to come up with a mathematical breakthrough in the next couple of days or so."

He gave a hollow laugh. "If I didn't figure it out in the three months I spent hiding in the garage, I'm not going to figure it out now."

Don looked up at his brother's rare acknowledgment of the time he'd spent avoiding their mother's deathbed. He wanted to ask him about it, like he had so many times since those terrible days when the entire family was slowly coming unwound. What had led Charlie to hide, as he put it, to focus on an unsolvable math problem instead of the unsolvable problem of Margaret Eppes' cancer? Mom had claimed to understand what was going on in her younger son's head, but she was never able to explain it to Don's satisfaction. And the fact that Charlie had brought it up, if obliquely, was an opportunity that rarely came along.

But their recent camaraderie and understanding was still a little too new, a little too tenuous, to risk by probing old wounds. And he needed whatever help his brother could give him here, even if it wasn't as neat and clean an answer as he would like. So he quirked up the corner of his mouth to acknowledge what Charlie had said, but also to indicate that he was going to let it pass. A flicker of understanding passed over Charlie's face, and then it was back to the case, and back to the math.

"Like I said, Don, I can narrow down the possibilities, but that will still take a couple of days. How urgent is this?"

"Get your grades done first." Don sighed. "We'll have to think of something else."

"Don, I'm really sorry." Charlie stared at the board. "Maybe if I tried a different approach…"

"Oh, no you don't." Don stood up and walked over, prepared to forcibly pull his brother away from the chalkboard if he had to. "There's no lives at stake, nothing that can't wait a few days. You don't have to do this, Charlie. We'll find another way."

He gave the board an almost longing look before turning away. "You're right. I have other things to do, and you have other approaches you can take. Right?"

"That's right." Don watched as his brother crossed back to his desk and plopped down behind the piles of exams. "Hey, I'll see you for dinner tomorrow night, okay?"

"You don't have to check up on me, Don. I'm not going to start working on P vs. NP." Charlie's tone was slightly exasperated as he rifled through another blue book.

"I know. I just feel like ribeye."

Now there was a grin on Charlie's face, though he remained focused on his work. "Someday you're going to have to tell me how you do that."

The corners of Don's eyes crinkled as he smiled. "Just something they taught us at Quantico, little brother."

His response was a dismissive wave. "Yeah, yeah. See you tomorrow."


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Chapter 1.

ooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 4  
Friday, June 17, 2005  
6:55 P.M.  
Eppes residence

Charlie rounded the corner from the kitchen into the dining room as the front door opened. "'Lo," Don's voice rang out as he stuck his head inside.

"Don! You're just in time." He set the wooden salad bowl on the table, catching a few green leaves as they tried to fall out.

"Hi, son. Charlie mentioned you'd be coming over." Alan was sitting on the couch, watching the last of the evening news.

"Yeah, I heard something about a steak with my name on it." Don closed the front door behind him and dropped his bag by the door. "Smells good."

"I was just about to take yours off the broiler," Charlie said, adding over his shoulder as he turned back towards the kitchen, "Those of us who actually like our meat cooked will be waiting a few minutes longer."

"Forget to start mine late again?" Don called after him.

Alan cut in. "Where you picked up this habit of eating pink meat, I don't know. You were perfectly content to eat a well-done steak when you were growing up."

"He thinks it impresses the girls." Charlie pitched his voice to carry out of the kitchen. "It's more manly or something."

"What!" he heard Don exclaim. "Where'd you get that idea?"

"A little birdie told me." He wondered if Don would call him on it, since he was actually making it up. He reasoned that Don's change in eating habits had come about sometime after he left L.A. for the FBI, and since talking about that time period was often a little touchy, Don would probably let it slide. Half the fun of teasing your older brother was knowing when you could get away with it free and clear.

Sure enough, a long-suffering, "Whatever, Charlie," soon came from the living room. He grinned to himself.

"Charlie, could you bring each of us a beer when you come out?" Alan called from the living room as he clicked the television off.

"Sure." Charlie reflected as he opened the refrigerator door and pulled out three dark brown bottles. No matter how old he was, it was still a little strange drinking in front of his father. Not that he'd sneaked a drink too many times when he was underage, but it was still a little odd. He deposited one bottle at each plate, and went back for Don's steak as the other two settled around the table.

"Now, this is nice," Alan said, looking at the both of them once Charlie was settled in his seat. "Friday night with my two favorite people."

Don and Charlie clinked their bottles with his, and Charlie said innocently, "You'd really rather be with us than Esmerelda?"

"Who?" Don asked, taking a swig of the amber-colored liquid.

Alan was shooting Charlie a glare that he blithely ignored. "Never mind."

"Someone Dad had dinner with earlier this week." Charlie scooped some salad onto his plate. "I understand she was quite taken with him."

"Dad?"

"She's not my type." Alan grabbed the salad bowl from Charlie. "Where 'my type' means someone with all their mental faculties."

Don choked on a sip of beer and Charlie gave his dad a reproving look. "Larry wouldn't have set you up with someone he thought was mentally deficient, Dad. She is a CalSci professor, after all."

"Oh, I don't mean to be cruel to the poor woman; she was perfectly nice. She's a marine biologist, about my age, and Larry thought we might get along. We went out to dinner at that nice Italian place on Green Street and for three hours, I didn't get a word in edgewise. She barely paused long enough to eat anything. I certainly learned a lot about zebra mussels and snakehead fish, but it wasn't the most enjoyable dinner I've ever had."

"Snakehead fish?" Charlie asked. Dad hadn't mentioned that earlier when he'd related his disastrous date story.

Alan chewed his salad before replying. "It's a kind of fish that can actually walk on land for short periods of time. It's invaded the Chesapeake Bay. Esmerelda studies exotic species, plants and animals that end up in an unfamiliar ecosystem and then take over." He waved his fork in the air. "Usually they're brought in accidentally, either in a ship's ballast water or as pets that get away."

"Sounds like you did learn a lot," Charlie said encouragingly. He'd attended a lecture by Dr. Esmerelda Ashford a couple of years ago and found her quite interesting, if a little long-winded. When Larry had tentatively suggested introducing her to Alan, he'd been taken aback for a moment at the thought of his two worlds of home and work colliding in such a fashion. Then he'd reflected on what he knew of Dr. Ashford and figured it wouldn't be so bad. From what Dad was saying, though, it looked like he wouldn't have to worry about it.

"Well, yes, I suppose I did. I'd still rather be eating dinner with you boys." He looked at Charlie. "Even if it means eating a very well-done steak."

It took a few seconds for his words to register. When they did, Charlie leaped out of his chair and into the kitchen, yanking open the broiler. Fortunately, the two remaining steaks were not yet burned, though they were quite crispy on the outside. "Sorry, Dad," he called, wincing as he inadvertently touched the hot broiler pan.

After he had deposited two very well-done steaks on their respective plates, ignoring Don's smirk as he cut into his own meat, Charlie took his seat again. He was about to ask Don how the smuggling case was going, when Alan asked, "So, Don, how was your date yesterday?"

Don nearly choked on his bite of steak. "What?"

Charlie exchanged a glance with his father. "You mean a real date? With a girl?"

"What, is that so hard to believe?" he snapped back.

As always in the role of peacemaker, Alan said, "Don, I called your office, and Terry said you were out to lunch with someone. She implied it wasn't work-related, so…"

"Her name is Dr. Karen Fisher. I don't think you met her, Charlie, but she was the witness that Cooper and I were protecting." Don gave a little shrug. "She's been having a little trouble dealing with what happened, and I just thought it would help if she talked to someone. So we went out to lunch yesterday. It wasn't a date."

"That was considerate of you," Alan said. "Were you able to help?"

"Yeah, I think so. I told her about -- " he gave their father a sidelong glance and went on -- "similar situations I've been in, and how I dealt with it. I mean, I'm no psychologist, but I think it helped."

"And are you going to 'help' her some more?" Charlie couldn't resist. The age difference and rivalry between the two of them had been too great when they were teenagers for him to tease his brother about his string of girlfriends. Even if it was over fifteen years later, he didn't want to pass up the opportunity.

Don shot him a glance from under his eyebrows. "Yeah, we're going out to dinner tomorrow." He stabbed a piece of lettuce. "Can we talk about something else?"

"You don't sound very happy about it," Alan said cautiously. "I thought going out to dinner with a nice, intelligent woman was a good thing."

"It is!" Don exclaimed. "I just…I don't want to jinx anything, you know?"

Charlie looked at him thoughtfully. Normally, Don had no problem with his family making comments about his personal life, at least within in reason. If he was being so touchy, either he was really serious about Dr. Fisher, or something else was bothering him.

"Okay," Charlie said slowly, deciding to let it slide for now. "So, uh, what's new with the smuggling case?"

Don grimaced in mid-bite. "Nothing."

"Smugglers?" Alan asked. "That sounds kind of old-fashioned, if you ask me."

"Yeah, but it's something very modern that they're smuggling." When Alan raised his eyebrows in inquiry, Don went on, "Freon."

"That's your contraband?" Charlie exclaimed.

"I didn't tell you?"

"No, all you said was that it was some kind of illegal material." He explained to Alan, "Don stopped by yesterday morning to ask for my help with the case."

"So what are you doing this time?" Alan asked him.

He looked down at his plate. "Nothing, actually."

"Too busy at the end of the term, right? Don, you have to stop relying on your brother so much. He has his own job, you know."

"No, Dad, it's actually something I can't do." He glanced up at Alan's astonished expression. "It reduces to a P vs. NP problem."

"Oh." Alan paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. Then he seemed to recover his equilibrium and looked at Don. "So who's smuggling freon?"

"We don't know," Don sighed. "We don't know where it's coming from, either, which is where I was hoping Charlie could help."

"If I could borrow some more of Larry's time on the supercomputer on campus -- " he started, already tracing possible approaches in his head.

"No, it's okay." Don leaned back in his chair. "Dad's right, we have our own resources and our own ways to figure things out. It's okay, Charlie."

He looked at him for a moment, then picked at his salad. He'd never had to turn down his brother before. He wasn't sure if it helped or not that it wasn't a matter of time constraints, but that Don had actually come up with a problem he couldn't solve. It made him feel less guilty, but it was a blow to his ego.

Don was outlining the basics of the case to their father. "So you see, we don't know where the ship might have gone to pick up this extra cargo."

"There's no manifest?"

"They tried to get rid of it. We have a good forensics expert reconstructing it, but it'll take time, and it might not be completely accurate anyway. So far she's found one container that disappeared somewhere along the way, but that's the opposite of what we're looking for."

"Maybe that container had the payment for the freon," Alan suggested.

"That's what we were thinking. It was one of the heavier ones listed on the manifest, at least from what we've seen so far."

Charlie lifted his head. "Was the ship weighed at all points along the trip?"

"Yes, and all of the weight changes are accounted for by what we've been able to make out of the manifest."

"Oh." He halfheartedly took a bite of steak. There had to be an answer here that he was missing. If the records were incomplete, then the truth had to be somewhere in the pattern of containers: when and where they were loaded. "Have you looked at the order the containers are stacked in the ship? Presumably the ones on top were put on last, right?"

"Our Customs guy says sometimes they rearrange them to put the lighter ones on top. So even though the freon was on top, that doesn't mean it was the last stop."

Charlie put his fork down. "So it was a relatively lightweight container." He could almost hear the light bulb click on in his head. When Don nodded, he went on, "And you figure what they traded for it was pretty heavy, right? But the weight didn't change overall?"

"No, and that's the weird thing. Nearly all of the containers on the ship have been accounted for, and it looks like nothing was added to make up for the weight. We're waiting to see if the whole manifest will tell us something once it's been reconstructed."

He looked over at their father. "What do you put in a ship to make it weigh more?"

Alan looked puzzled. "What do you mean, Charlie? Usually you're trying to make it weigh as little as possible, right?"

"Not if you're nearly empty and don't want to tip over in a storm. Or, not if you're trying to hide something." He briefly looked at Don, and could almost see the wheels turning in his brother's head, trying to catch up with his mental leap. He supposed it was the teacher in him, but he couldn't come out and say it without dropping a hint so they could figure it out for themselves. "Esmerelda?"

The two older men looked at each other, and then Don gave a nod. "Ballast water," he said.

Charlie sat back in his chair, satisfied. "If they switched a heavier container for a lighter one, but the weight didn't change, they must have taken on some ballast water at the same port where they loaded the freon."

"You think we can figure out where that is based on the chemistry of the water in the 'Buir Lake' or something?" Don asked, pulling his phone out of his pocket.

"Not the water," Alan said. "What's in the water. Charlie's right, I heard enough about this the other night. Whatever plankton and other little creatures were living in the water in your mystery port, they're now in the ballast tank of your ship. Assuming it hasn't been emptied into the harbor yet."

"It shouldn't have." Don was dialing a number. "No one is supposed to go near that ship." He patted Charlie on the shoulder as he rose from his chair. "Great work, Charlie. You, too, Dad. Thanks." Then his voice changed. "Hello, is this Jason Ramos? Agent Eppes here."

Don's voice faded as he walked into the living room, and Charlie grinned across the table. "This time you didn't even have to think like a criminal, Dad."

"No, just a marine biologist. And before you say anything -- " he pointed his steak knife -- "I guess something good did come out of that date after all. But don't tell Larry I said so, or he'll set me up again."

"You know, Dad, she'd be an excellent choice for studying the organisms in the water if they can get it out of the ship," Charlie said innocently, taking a sip of his beer. "I'm sure she'd been even more amenable to helping if it was someone she already knew who asked her."

Alan gave him a sharp look. "You already know her. You're a colleague of hers. I think that carries more weight than a man she went out to dinner with once and didn't learn anything about."

"Okay, but don't say I didn't offer."

Alan muttered something and sliced off a piece of steak.

Charlie hid a smile behind his beer bottle. He'd never really been comfortable teasing his father until Don returned to California. They'd been brought up to strictly respect their elders, and since for Charlie most of his peers were also his elders, he'd had a hard time getting over that long enough to make friends with people older than him. Don had always been closer to their father, and Charlie remembered him teasing the older man like Charlie never would have dared.

It wasn't until their mother's fight with cancer that he began to realize his parents were normal, fallible people, just like him. While there certainly wasn't a lot of laughter in the Eppes household for a few years, once the storm of grief had passed, Charlie found himself acting differently towards his father. They had all endured something together, despite their different relationship to Margaret Eppes, that put them on the same page. He and his father were now equals in a sense. He supposed every son realized at some point that he was a grown man like his father, but his mother's death had put that into sharp relief.

The first time he pretended to insult Alan, over a game of chess, his father had had a snappy comeback that left him both insulted and relieved at the same time. Since then, he'd gotten his son back a few times. Charlie's purchase of the family house had made him even more of an equal with his father, and the teasing had increased proportionately. Looking across the table as he chewed his last bite of steak, Charlie still couldn't believe that not only had he called Alan an "old man" a few weeks ago, but it had gone over without incident.

As long as you considered a 388-72 Scrabble score as being "without incident."


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Chapter 1.

Thanks again for your reviews (both past and future)!

ooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 5  
Saturday, June 18  
6:58 P.M.  
I-405, Los Angeles

As the sea of red taillights in front of him got thicker, Don was tempted for a moment to activate the siren and lights on his vehicle. Sure, he was returning from the scene of a crime, not going to one, but surely exceptions could be made on occasion. Oh, maybe if he'd been going back to the office with a suspect in custody. Not on his way to a date, albeit his first date in…well…it didn't matter how long it had been.

He was still surprised it had happened at all. He hadn't had anything but friendly intentions when he suggested to Karen that they meet over lunch earlier in the week. She had just looked so shell-shocked and unlike her earlier self that he felt he had to do something. And then somehow they'd talked for what had turned into a two-hour lunch before he had realized the time was passing.

His initial assessment had been right: she needed to talk about what had happened to her. She'd opened up fairly easily, talking in a low tone about the fear and helplessness she'd felt when McDowd burst into the safe house and started dragging her up to the roof. The convict had told her in detail about what he planned to do to her before killing her, and Don had found his hands clenching into fists as she talked. He wished for a moment that he had taken Cooper's suggestion about dropping the fugitive over the edge of the building, both as a way to deliver justice and to spare Karen from having to go through yet another trial.

Then Don had offered up the story about the first time he'd been held at gunpoint, and how with all of the training he'd had for that type of situation, he was still petrified. Paradoxically, it had seemed to reassure her that even a trained FBI agent would have been scared in her situation. He finally got her to agree to talk to an FBI psychologist if the nightmares she'd been having didn't go away.

Then, a slightly different tone in her voice, she had asked him if the FBI always conducted these "follow-up visits" with the witnesses they protected. Caught off-guard by her question, he had stammered out something about how he felt responsible for what happened to her since he hadn't been wise to Lieutenant Reid sooner, while Coop's teasing about a good-looking witness played through his head. She had looked somewhat dubious, and he had remembered thinking that her tone of voice was the same one she had used when asking if he had come to her office to check up on her. It hadn't really registered at the time, since he'd been more concerned with how to break the bad news to her. But it was definitely a flirting tone.

So he had flirted right back. And somehow in the ensuing ten minutes of conversation, he had asked her to dinner, and she had accepted. It had taken at least another half hour before he was able to drag himself away from the deli and back to his office, and somewhere in there he had realized that Coop was right. He'd been treating her differently from any other witness all along because he was attracted to her. Not that he wouldn't do his utmost to protect anyone in his care, but the way he tried to cheer her up after it was all over, and certainly the way he was checking up on her now, made it clear that Karen Fisher was different.

And now he was going to be seriously late, probably killing any chance he had with her. He dialed up the number that he had programmed into his cellphone just in case, and listened to it ring as he inched along in traffic.

"This is Karen."

"Hey, Karen, it's Don."

"Hi." She paused. "Please tell me you haven't been called away to a crime scene or something."

He smiled into the phone. "No, I'm just a little late. Traffic on the 405, you know."

"That's what they all say." But the tone of her voice was warm. "Do you have any idea how late you'll be?"

"Not more than fifteen minutes. I just wanted to let you know."

She sounded slightly surprised. "That's nice of you, Don. I'll see you soon, then."

"All right." He hung up the phone and returned his concentration to the traffic creeping along in front of him. It wasn't rush hour, it was even a weekday, for God's sake, but this was Los Angeles. He briefly thought of the traffic-free streets of Albuquerque, and then shook his head. Home was better. For any number of reasons, starting and ending with his family.

He thought about dinner last night and smiled. Both Charlie and Dad had shown remarkable restraint in not pressing him about his date tonight. He knew that he sometimes slipped into his Voice of Authority, as Terry called it, without realizing it. Maybe last night had been one of those times. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about his personal life with his family, but as he had told them, he felt like he would be jinxing it if he said anything. He'd felt this connection when talking to Karen over lunch that he hadn't felt with anyone for a long time, not since Kim and maybe not even then. He was also afraid of reading too much into things, of suggesting there was something there when she really just wanted someone to talk to about what had happened to her.

He finally exited the freeway onto Santa Monica Boulevard and started down the final miles towards the water. They were meeting at a restaurant overlooking the ocean, apparently a short walk from her condo. She said it was a nice, quiet place with a great view, and even though the food sounded a little trendier than he was used to, he said that sounded fine.

Karen had said she'd be waiting outside the restaurant or just across the street. After handing off his keys to the valet attendant, he scanned the line of people outside _Cezanne_, congratulating himself on making a reservation. But he didn't see a tall blond woman anywhere. Turning around, he saw a park across the street. A woman was leaning against the railing, looking out over the ocean. He smiled and crossed the street towards her. The breeze coming off the ocean brought the faint scent of roses, and as he got closer and didn't see any of the flowers, he figured it must be her perfume.

His feet crunched on the gravel path as he approached, and she whirled around, her expression wary. Then she recognized him, and her face lit up in a smile. She was wearing a long brown skirt and a chestnut-colored top that deepened the color of her hair, and her green eyes were sparkling.

"You look beautiful," he said, suddenly conscious of the wrinkles in his black dress shirt after sitting in the car for the past hour.

A faint blush stained her cheeks. "Thank you," she replied. "My dad always likes to tease me about how nicely I clean up when I'm not wearing a doctor's coat."

"Well, he's right." He offered her his arm. "Shall we?"

They were seated right away, and exchanged small talk while waiting for the menus to arrive. After placing their orders, Don leaned a little closer and dropped his voice. "So, Karen, how are you doing?"

"I'm fine." He looked at her more closely, and she went on, "No, really, I am. I've been sleeping better since we talked, and I don't jump nearly as high when someone startles me."

He gave her a rueful glance. "Sorry about that."

"No, it's not your fault. I'm just a little jumpy still, you know?"

He thought of the wariness on her face a moment ago out in the park. "That's perfectly understandable," he replied. He knew it would take time for her to adjust, but at the same time he wanted to see that strong, fearless woman she'd been when they first met in her office, and he would do anything he could to bring her back.

"I really appreciate you taking the time for me the other day, Don. I know you must have a lot on your plate right now. I saw your name in the paper as the agent in charge of that big smuggling case down at the port."

"Yeah, it's turned into something a lot bigger than I expected. That's why I was late." He hesitated, not sure how much more he should say.

She folded her hands on the table. "Much as I'd like to hear about it, can we make a rule for tonight? No shop talk for either of us?"

He gave a half laugh and fingered the stem of his wine glass. "I'm afraid there's not much else to my life, sad as that sounds."

"You're forgetting that you're talking to someone who doesn't know anything about you. Where you're from, where you went to college, what your favorite color is…"

"Pasadena, UCLA, blue." The corner of his mouth turned up. "Anything else you want to know?"

She propped her chin on her hand, elbow resting on the table. "When's the last time you went on a date?"

He blinked. Not since he'd moved to L.A. three years ago. Before that, he'd been involved with Kim for three years, and he wasn't sure at what point they crossed the line from going on dates to something more serious. Maybe when she'd come home with him for the Christmas that Charlie was in London, or maybe --

His thoughts broke off as he realized Karen was looking down at her plate and fidgeting with her fork. "I'm sorry, that's probably too personal," she was saying.

"No, no, it's okay. I guess you can tell from how long it took me to think of something that it's been a while." It had, indeed, been a very long time since he felt that half-pleasant, half-nerve-wracking rush that came with getting to know someone. He was pleased to find that he was enjoying it, minor awkward moments aside.

She looked up at him. "Yeah, me too."

"So, uh, what about you? Your three questions."

"Oh. Well, I grew up in Sausalito, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. So of course I went to college as far away as I could, to Dartmouth. Then back to USF for med school, and then I moved down here to start my own practice."

"Is your family still in the Bay Area?"

"My parents, yes. I have one older sister, and right now she's in, let me think…It's June, right? I think she's in Vienna."

"Austria?" When Karen nodded, he went on, "What does she do?"

"She's a concert violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. They're on tour this summer in Europe."

"Wow. Do you play?"

Karen shook her head and took a sip of wine. "No, Missy's always been the musician in the family."

Something in her tone sounded achingly familiar. "Have I told you about my brother?"

For the next half hour, interrupted only by the arrival of their food, they shared stories about growing up in the shadow of a sibling. Don told her how great it was to have Charlie back in his life, and how he thought they were closer now than they ever could have been growing up, because of the age difference and the jealousy that Charlie's special situation had sparked in his older brother. She told him that she was lucky there was a world-class medical school where she could live at home and pay in-state tuition, after her older sister had gone to Juilliard. Not that her parents weren't supportive of her, she hastened to add, but Juilliard was, well, Juilliard. And since she'd wanted to be a doctor ever since she was a little girl, there was no reason to think she wouldn't make it happen somehow.

"How about you?" she asked. "What made you decide to be an FBI agent?"

He swallowed his bite of salad and said, "Oh, a bunch of things. Some classes I took in college, a recruiter I talked to on campus once, a friend of mine whose dad was in the FBI. The desire to get as far away from California as I could, at least for the training."

She chuckled. "I hear you. No one in the family, though?"

"No, my dad was a city planner before he retired, and Mom was an elementary school teacher before we came along."

"What does your family think of what you do?"

He put down his fork and thought for a moment. "They're okay with it. I mean, it freaked my dad out when I first told him what I was going to do, you know, and he still worries when he doesn't hear from me on a regular basis. But they never tried to talk me out of it."

She was regarding him more carefully. "How dangerous of a job is it, really?"

"Hey, I thought we weren't going to talk shop." When she gave a little shrug, he went on, "I suppose there are more risks than most people face on the job. But I'm trained to deal with them, and I know what I'm doing. Besides, it's a lot more repetitive grunt work than you'd think from watching TV or the movies."

Karen opened her mouth to say something, and an electronic ring sounded from the vicinity of the floor. She gave a start, and then dove for her purse. She pulled out a pager and quickly stopped it from ringing further, frowning as she read the number on the display. "Don, I'm really sorry," she said, looking up at him.

He gave her what he hoped was a smile instead of a grimace of disappointment. "Hey, it's okay. I understand." He'd had a mental bet on with himself as to which one of them was more likely to get called away from dinner; it looked like he'd lost.

She was already standing up, gathering her wrap from the back of her chair. "It's one of my patients whose due date is in three weeks, and she's had a few complications already. I'm sorry, but I really have to go."

He rose belatedly, signaling to a waiter as he did so and ignoring the curious stares from the tables next to them. "Can I give you a ride? At least back to your place?"

"That would be wonderful." She smiled gratefully. "I'm sorry," she said again, gesturing at the half-eaten dinner on their plates.

He waved it off. "No problem." A waiter had appeared at his elbow, and he quickly explained the situation. As the man bustled off for the check, he dug out his valet slip and handed it to Karen. "Why don't you get that started and I'll meet you out front." She hesitated for a moment, and he laid a hand on her elbow. "Come on, go. I'll be right there."

She flashed him another smile and headed for the door.

Five minutes later, he was pulling up in front of a high-rise building towering over the ocean below. "I really appreciate this, Don," Karen said as she opened the door. "And I'm sorry."

"Would you stop saying that?" He laid a gentle hand on her arm, and she paused. "Next time, it'll be my turn to get called away. Just you watch."

Then he realized what he had just said, and he swallowed. Was he being too presumptuous?

But a warm smile was spreading across her face, and she said softly, "I'll hold you to that." Then she swiftly leaned forward and kissed his cheek before slipping out of the car and into the building, leaving a faint trace of roses behind her.


	6. Chapter 6

Okay, enough of the mushy stuff, let's get back to the case…

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Chapter 1.

ooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 6  
Tuesday, June 21  
11:25 A.M.  
Huntington Beach, CA

Terry climbed out of the SUV onto the pavement and stretched her legs. The sun was already high in the sky, but it didn't deter the volleyball players down on the beach. An accident on the 405 had delayed them, but fortunately the games below were still in progress. Whether the person she was looking for was among the players was another question.

While Don hadn't exactly been forthcoming with the details of his date Saturday night, he had told her the story of Alan's date last week and the positive consequences for their investigation. It had taken a couple of days to get samples from the 'Buir Lake' ballast tanks, but Dr. Esmerelda Ashford had been more than willing to run a quick analysis. She'd delivered her findings via Charlie, who agreed that Alan had a point about her loquaciousness. After an hour of discussing laboratory techniques and plankton biogeography, she'd finally confirmed that the ballast water had come from the eastern side of the Sea of Okhotsk, off the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, well north of Japan. It was a perfect final stop for a ship sailing from Asia to Los Angeles, and a perfect out-of-the-way spot for a little smuggling. It also narrowed the list of likely candidates for the smugglers themselves, and that was what they were here to confirm with an old friend of hers.

Don slammed the door of the Suburban. "How long has it been since you've been out here, Terry?"

She looked out across the rows of volleyball nets and the tanned, masculine bodies on either side. "Too long," she muttered as she put on her sunglasses.

He chuckled. "Do you see him?"

She took her time, scanning the dozen or so courts staked out in the sand, watching the strong, muscular bodies leaping and diving for the ball. Finally she answered, "I think that's him. Three courts from the end, the blond who is about to make a killer spike."

Sure enough, within a few seconds, the man in question had pushed off the sand and gained enough height to slam the volleyball into the ground on the near side of the net. "I wouldn't want to be on the other side of that," Don said, shaking his head.

"You can't move fast enough to actually return it. All you can do is stick your arms out and hope you're in the right place for it to bounce off."

"Give me a baseball any day." Don started walking, and she caught up. "How long did you play, anyway?"

"Here at Huntington Beach? Just the first few years I lived in L.A. I got too busy with work." She watched the same blond man, now standing behind the back line of the court, execute a perfect jump serve. "And it was a lot different than the volleyball I played in high school and college. I never really got the hang of the sand."

The ball came scorching over the net and thumped into the ground between the two players on the other side, who looked at each other in frustration. "Yeah, I can see that," he agreed.

As they left the parking lot and started down the concrete stairs, Terry tried to ignore how self-conscious she felt. Her job often required her to be the only person in the room in a suit, but this was different. She and Don were severely overdressed, literally as well as figuratively. Sure enough, as they started across the sand, a number of heads turned to watch their progress. Most people resumed their games, but a few tracked their progress until they reached the court they were headed towards.

Somehow it didn't surprise her that the four men seemingly hadn't even noticed their presence, since they had been playing more intensely than anyone else for as long as the two of them had been watching. She laid a hand on Don's arm, and he stopped. They were about ten feet behind the court, and the same man was still serving from the opposite side of the net. From this distance, his hair was clearly brown, but streaked with enough blond that it looked pale from farther away. "Prepare to duck," she said wryly.

The man tossed the ball high into the air, took a few running steps, and then leapt into the air as he raised an arm and slammed his open hand against the ball. But instead of crashing into the ground immediately over the net, the ball followed a higher trajectory. She watched Don flinch as the ball sailed past, two feet to the left of his head.

"Terry, you and your friend should know better than to stand in such a dangerous location." The Slavic accent came from the tall, shirtless man who had just blown the serve. "It hasn't been that long, has it?"

"No, Mick, it hasn't." She took a few steps back and picked the ball up from where it had hit the sand. "How are you?" she called, walking forward between his court and the one next to it.

He expressively spread his hands wide. "As long as I am here, life is good."

"Uh huh." She tossed the ball up in the air and caught it. "So there haven't been any more…problems?"

The expression on Mikhail's face changed from a broad grin to a slighly embarrassed one, and his hands fell to his sides. "No, no, everything is fine."

"That's good." She handed the ball over to the well-muscled redhead on the side of the court nearest them. "We can catch up once you're done with the game."

"Actually, we just started," said the redhead, looking her over. "If this is important, we can take a break."

"If you don't mind," Don interjected. She had to bite back a grin at his bristling tone of voice.

When the redhaired guy shook his head after giving her another appraising look, Terry brightly said "Great!" and paid him no further mind as she started forward.

After she ducked under the net, she let out a squeal as Mick picked her up and swung her around. He hadn't changed a bit: still the best-looking man she'd ever seen who wasn't on a movie screen. He was six inches or so taller than her, especially since her heels were sinking into the sand, and as tan as anyone on the beach.

"You look great," he said, holding her at arm's length. "Though you aren't wearing the right clothes for volleyball, hm?"

"I'm afraid we're here on business." She glanced at Don, and he came forward. "This is my partner, Don Eppes. Don, this is Mikhail Boroday, the best Ukranian volleyball player in all of California."

Don extended his hand. "How do you do?"

Mick removed his sunglasses before shaking Don's hand, revealing golden-brown eyes that held a challenging look. "So, you are the one who took Terry away from me?"

Don blinked. "I'm sorry?"

Terry gave the taller man a slap on his muscular arm, unable to hide her grin at the expression on her partner's face. "Away from the volleyball court, he means." When Don nodded, she went on, "No, it was a lot of things, Mick. I do miss it, though."

"And we miss you here." He perched his wrap-around sunglasses on the top of his short, spiked hair and said, "So, before my teammate gets bored and takes up with someone else, what is this business of yours?" He lowered his voice and leaned in towards Terry. "It isn't that woman again, is it? I told you I didn't know she wanted money."

Don's eyebrows were rising towards his hairline, but she gave him a look that said, "I'll explain later." Aloud she said, "No, Mick, it's not about her. Do you still work at the port?"

The warmth in his eyes died away, and his richly accented voice grew wary. "Why do you want to know?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "Last week a ship came in to Long Beach carrying some contraband chemicals that we've traced back to Kamchatka." When Mick looked away, she went on, "We don't know who's behind it, but it's a pretty major operation. We're assuming they're Russian, but we don't know who they are, only that they have a pretty long reach. Do you know anything about it, or know anyone at the port who could help us out?"

"And here I thought you liked me, Terry." Mick's voice was full of black humor.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Don asked.

The other man shot him a glance. "You sound like you already have a good idea of who you are after. If that's the case, then you know why I will tell you I don't know anything." He turned to face Terry, an earnest expression on his face. "And why you should stop investigating."

"Mick, we can't just give up a case." She shifted her stance, wishing her pumps had a thicker heel so she would stop sinking into the sand. "Why is this so dangerous?"

He gave a short laugh. "I have some idea of the ship you are talking about, yes. But If I told you anything, and it got back to them, I would be dead. That's it. I like my life, Terry." He made the same gesture he had earlier, arms encompassing the entire beach. "It's as you say, the American dream, yes? Or at least the California dream. I have a good job, I have a nice house from which I walk to the beach and play volleyball whenever I want. I don't want my dream to end with a bullet in my head."

"Like Paul Everett?" Don asked.

Mick's shoulders twitched, but that was all. "I don't know who that is," he said quietly, dropping his eyes to the ground.

"I think you do." Don took a step forward and lowered his voice. "If we could stop talking in circles here and name some other names -- "

The Ukrainian jerked his head up. "You don't understand. Just by being here, you put me in danger. Whatever you go out and investigate now, they will think it came from me. Even if I tell you nothing."

"Then tell us something." Terry laid a hand on his arm. "We can get you protection, Mick."

He shrugged off her hand. "No, you can't. Not from the volki."

"Who?" Don asked.

"You heard me," Mick said. There was a long pause, and then he asked in an even lower voice, "Where are you looking for the buyers?"

"I thought you didn't know anything," Don started, but Terry held out her hand, palm towards him. She said quietly, "Repair shops, auto body shops. Is that right?"

Mick looked at her for a long moment, his face impassive except for the changing emotions flickering through his eyes. Finally his gaze shifted to the volleyball courts next to them, as if checking to make sure no one was listening. "This is nothing that you could not figure out yourselves, but it is all I can say. You know how much freon there was on the ship. Once you find where it is being used -- if you are on the right track with that -- you will know how fast it is being used."

"And when the next shipment is due," Terry deduced.

He looked back at her. "I am sorry you didn't come here to play volleyball, Terry. I hope I will see you here again." And with that, he laid a gentle hand on her shoulder before striding off towards the three men who were volleying the ball back and forth, waiting to resume the game.

She thought about the double meaning of his last words as they walked back through the sand to the car. Had they really put Mick in jeopardy just by asking him questions? Depending on who the smugglers were, the answer to that question could well be yes. Based on the speed at which Don's informant had been dealt with, it almost certainly was. So what now? Did they not act on his information, in order to protect him? Should she recommend a watch be put on him, or his house?

They reached the top of the stairs, and she paused to look back as Don unlocked the Suburban. The game had resumed, and Mick was playing even more vigorously than he had before. After a particularly wicked spike, he looked up at her, but he was too far away for her to see the expression on his face. With a sad smile, she climbed in the SUV, wondering if she would, in fact, see him again.

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Finally Don spoke up. "We can put a watch on him if you think it's necessary."

Terry stared out the window at the surf shops and motels flashing by. "I don't know if it's practical. He spends all his time here or at the port, and they're both tight-knit enough communities that a tail would stand out."

"But you're worried about him." Don's voice showed personal as well as professional concern, and she was grateful for it.

She sighed. "Yeah, I am. Mick's a tough guy, not easily frightened. He's Ukranian by birth, but he grew up in Russia and served in the army for a few years. Then he decided to come to the U.S. rather than be stationed in Chechnya."

"You can just do that?"

"He can't exactly go back home," she explained.

"Oh." Don slowed to a stop as the light turned red. "So he lives the life of a beach bum instead."

"You heard him describe it. What's not to like?" She sighed again. "I wish I knew if he was actually involved in the smuggling, or if he's only heard things about it."

"We could pull him in for questioning."

She shook her head vigorously. "Then we'd need to keep him in protective custody for God knows how long. He's right, it's bad enough that we showed up and started asking him questions like that. I just didn't think it would be as big an operation as he was hinting at."

"What are these volki that he was talking about?"

"It's the Russian word for 'wolves.' It's not a proper name, but it's used to refer to certain branches of the Russian mafia. The more ruthless branches."

"So that is who we're dealing with. At least he gave us that much."

"I don't think he realized we didn't know that for sure. Otherwise I'm sure he never would have said anything." She was about to say more when her phone rang. After digging in her purse to find it, she raised the device to her ear. "Hello?"

"Agent Lake? This is Andrea Sayers. Is Don there?"

"Yeah, but he's driving and the traffic's getting heavy. Can I pass on a message?"

"Sure. Tell him I finally finished with the forensic analysis of the ship's manifest, and I'm sorry it took so long." She continued talking as Terry jotted down notes, occasionally asking a question to clarify a point. She chuckled at Sayers' last statement before signing off and closing up the phone.

"What's so funny?" Don asked, squinting into the sun reflecting off the car in front of them.

"That was Andrea, and she's got the manifest all worked out. It's nothing new, unfortunately, but it does verify the ballast water results. The city of Kirovski showed up, which is within the parameters of where the 'Buir Lake' could have sailed in the time available. Actually, she says it's most likely it was their last stop in Asia, since it's definitely on the way along the Great Circle Route."

"Do we know anything about Kirovski?"

She shook her head. "Not yet. The other thing she had to say is that they took on the disappearing container in Osaka, early in the trip."

Don nodded. "That's good. I'll have to talk to her when we get back."

Terry grinned. "That's the other thing she said, and I quote, 'Tell Don I'd like to change my order to a double hazelnut.'"

He groaned. "If I bought everyone a latte for doing their job right, I'd go through my salary pretty fast."

"We do work with good people, don't we?" Terry agreed.

"Mm hm." They drove in silence for a little while longer. Then she asked, "So, I didn't get to ask you how dinner went on Saturday."

Don sighed as he hit the brakes, matching the sea of red taillights in front of them. "It was great until the point when her pager went off. At least we got half the meal in before that."

"That's too bad," she replied. "I suppose it could have just as easily been you getting called away, though."

"Yeah, I told her next time it probably would be." He gave a self-deprecating laugh. "For some reason, she thinks it's worth trying again. We're going to have lunch on Friday, since that's all she can fit in her schedule this week."

"That's great, Don." She really meant it, too. She didn't know a lot about her partner's personal life, but she was pretty sure he hadn't dated anyone since breaking things off with Kim. Whatever kind of history there was between the two of them, she'd long ago realized that it was, in fact, history. It was good to know that at least one of them had the potential for a romantic relationship.

"Yeah, but try getting a doctor's schedule to line up with an FBI agent's." He shook his head. "So, uh, you and Mick?"

Terry suppressed a smile. She'd been waiting for this ever since she told Don about her friend and potential informant. "Is there a question in that statement?" she asked in an innocent tone.

"I'm just asking. How long were you involved with him?"

"Involved? Oh, not at all."

He looked over, surprise visible on his face. "I thought that -- I'm sorry, I shouldn't make assumptions like that. I just figured, you know…"

She let him off the hook. "No, Don, it's okay. Not that I would have minded. I mean, besides being the most gorgeous man I've ever met, he's also very sweet and considerate. Of course, he knows he's good-looking, which can be annoying, particularly since he flirts with anything in a skirt, or a bikini, as the case may be."

"How long have you known him?"

She looked out the window, lost in thought for a moment. "I started playing volleyball not long after I moved here. The divorce had just been finalized, and I swore I wasn't going to get involved again for a while, you know? Then I met Mick and realized how easy it would be to get a crush on him. Then one time he said I reminded him of his sister, and I figured that was it. But we actually got to be pretty good friends, and it was nice to have a world that was completely separate from work." She sighed and leaned her head back against the seat. "I hope we haven't done the wrong thing by talking to him today."

"We'll be careful, Terry. I can have someone keep a very light tail on him. He is a potential witness, you know."

She thought for a moment. "That might not be a bad idea. I know we probably should have taken him in for more thorough questioning, but I think it would put him in too much danger. We can always come back."

"Though it sounded like he already owes you one favor." Don's probing tone of voice was the same one he used on suspects at the start of an interrogation.

She couldn't help the grin that spread across her face. As they drove back to the office, she entertained Don with the story of a Ukrainian volleyball player, a late night at a beachside bar with a tall blond woman, a frantic phone call asking for a favor accompanied by ferverently-sworn promises that he had not known the woman was going to demand payment in the morning, and a favor owed Terry by the Huntington Beach chief of police.


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer and beta thanks came in Chapter 1. Reviews come at the end of this chapter. Thanks!

oooooooooooooooo

Chapter 7  
Thursday, June 23  
5:35 P.M.  
FBI field office, Los Angeles

"Bad news, Don."

He swiveled in his seat to stare at David, who was approaching his desk with a printout in his hand. "Please don't tell me that's the last one."

The younger agent nodded unhappily. "Fifteen hundred and ninety-three auto body shops in Los Angeles County that handle A/C repair. Only twelve of them have any illicit freon, and nowhere near the total in that shipment we confiscated."

Don leaned his head all the way back to stare at the ceiling. "I guess Orange County is next, then."

David groaned. "It'll probably take another week to cover all -- " he checked the printout in his hand -- "one thousand and twenty-eight of them. You're not in a hurry, are you?"

"Well, according to Charlie's calculations, we might have only two days before another shipment comes in, so yes, we're in a hurry."

"I thought you needed to know where the freon was being used before you could figure out when the next load was due in." David perched on Terry's desk.

He shook his head. "We thought so, too, but he pointed out that if Kirovski, Russia, is the point of origin for the freon, all he had to do was look at the distance between the last stop of a ship and its time of arrival in L.A. or Long Beach to see if it could have made an extra stop. He's been going over ships' records from the past year or so to see how they stack up."

David whistled. "That must be thousands of ships."

"Yeah. He's already identified two likely candidates, one of which is due to arrive in two days." Don leaned forward and rested his elbows on the arms of his chair. "He's determined to compute an answer for us. It really bothered him that he couldn't figure it all out with some equation when I asked him. That P vs. NP thing is like his nemesis or something."

"But he figured it out anyway, right? You said that he suggested checking the ballast water in the ship to see where it came from."

"But that wasn't using math."

"Oh." David reflected for a moment. "A lot of times when he helps us out, it's not really using math, is it? He's just a smart guy."

"Yeah, but he gets so defensive sometimes. You've heard him go off about how everything is numbers. I think he takes it personally when sometimes that's not the case."

David smiled. "Yeah, for something that isn't even his job, he sure gets wrapped up in the work here."

"I think he does see it as his job. He's a professor of applied mathematics, right? So everything he does here is applying his skills, being an applied mathematician."

"Without getting paid. I mean, he must spend hours doing stuff for you. If he billed all that…"

Don looked away. "I don't think it's just for me, David, I think it's for the cases. He likes the work; he's said so a number of times. Besides, he consults for lots of government agencies, not just us."

"Think what you like." David hopped off the desk and tapped Don's arm with the folded-up printout he still held. "Charlie wouldn't put in the hours he does here if it weren't for you." Then he walked away across the bullpen.

Don rubbed his chin in thought. Just like Dad had said a month ago. Until Charlie nearly walked in front of that sniper's bullet, he hadn't really given it much thought. But he'd been watching his brother since then, and he was starting to realize that their father was right. And now even other team members were noticing it. While he knew Charlie enjoyed the challenge of a real-life problem, and that he tended to work himself into the ground on his own projects, he hadn't yet said no to Don.

Until last week. Even then, he could tell it had obviously pained his little brother to have to turn him down, not because of time constraints, but because for once, his brilliant mind and his beloved mathematics weren't up to the task. He'd certainly done a lot to help since then, even overcoming the original problem by using a completely different approach. That was purely serendipitous, thanks to Dad's date, but it had the same result in the end. He hoped Charlie's estimate of the next freon shipment would be useful, otherwise it was really going to upset him.

Terry's voice behind him broke his train of thought. "Good, Don, you're still here."

He swiveled to face her. "I thought you left for the day."

"I did, but when I got home, I had a piece of mail that I thought you should see." She held out a small package wrapped in plain brown paper, her name and address scrawled across the front.

"Whoa!" He instinctively pushed his chair backward, holding his hands up in front of him. "Has someone downstairs looked at that? Or David? He's the bomb expert, you know."

She was shaking her head, turning it over to show him she had already neatly slit the package open. "No, it's nothing like that. But it has some bearing on the case."

"Don't do that to me, Terry." He reached out and took the package from her.

"Sorry. I did examine it carefully before I opened it, you know." Her voice was reproachful.

He shot her a glance of apology. "I've heard stories about the Russian mafia. If that's who we're dealing with here…" He broke off as he opened the box and took out a small keychain shaped like a volleyball. It been resting on top of a postcard which showed a Japanese woodcut of boats sailing out of a harbor. On the back of the postcard was scrawled a message. "Happy belated birthday, Terry. Sorry I missed it; maybe we can catch up at that 24/6 diner you like near Seal Beach. Call me."

He held the two items up. "Isn't your birthday in February?"

She nodded. "I think it's just an excuse for sending me a message. Recognize the postcard?"

He squinted at it. "Should I?"

"It's one of the 'Eight Views of Omi,' a famous serious of Japanese woodblock prints from the nineteenth century."

Don shifted in his chair. "I have to admit, art history class was kinda better for napping than notetaking."

She gave him a mock glare. "This particular one features the Kyoto harbor."

He flipped the postcard over. "And the message? What kind of a diner is open twenty-four hours but only six days a week?"

"Seal Beach is right next to Long Beach. Mick's European, so he writes the date with the month after the day. June 24, Long Beach harbor, a ship from Kyoto."

He checked the calendar. "That's tomorrow night. That's before Charlie's deadline."

"He might not have found all the possible candidates yet."

Don blew out a breath. "Yeah, and he's going to be pissed to find out he's missed one already. All right, can you tell David what we've got? Let me call Ramos at Customs and get a list of the ships scheduled to make port tonight to see if there's any from Kyoto. If there are, I think you'd better cancel any hot dates you've got tomorrow."

"You're the one with the hot date," she retorted.

"It's just lunch, but that might not even be possible." He sighed. "What was that I was saying about matching up an FBI agent's schedule and a doctor's?"

"She'll understand, Don." Terry laid a sympathetic hand on his arm. "Once this case gets wrapped up, you'll have a lot more free time."

"Until the next one comes along," he muttered. "All right, let's get to work and get ready to spring another trap."

oooooooooooooo

Friday, June 24  
12:30 P.M.  
Olvera Street, L.A.

Karen ducked inside the small Mexican restaurant and quickly scanned the patrons, unaccustomed butterflies rising in her stomach. Finally she spotted Don towards the back, discussing something on his cell phone in a low voice. She stood there for a moment, unsure about whether or not to interrupt him. As she waited indecisively, he noticed her across the crowded restaurant and waved her over. So she took a deep breath and threaded her way through the tables, one hand unconsciously reaching up to smooth down her flyaway hair.

As she came closer, she heard him say, "Okay, thanks for letting me know. I'll get back to you in a couple of hours." Then he flipped the phone closed and smiled at her. "Hi."

"Hi." She gestured at the phone as she sat down in the booth across from him. "I didn't mean to interrupt anything."

He tucked the phone back in his pocket. "No, it's okay. Like I told you on the phone last night, something came up and I've got a lot of work to do tonight. We're just making final arrangements."

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "Is it about the smugglers?" Somehow she envisioned mysterious crates being unloaded in the dead of night in some isolated, windswept cove, with a tall ship vanishing into the mists. In reality, she knew it was probably drugs or human smuggling or something else equally abhorrent, but the romantic image was easier to hold onto.

He met her eyes briefly before looking away. "I can't really say. I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I understand." She sat back against the booth, ignoring a pang of disappointment. "At least we had made plans for lunch, not dinner, right?"

"Yeah," he agreed. Then they were briefly interrupted by the waiter taking their orders, and then again when their drinks arrived.

When they were alone again, Karen started, "Listen, I'm sorry about the other night."

"Don't worry about it. One of the hazards of the job, right?" he said with a quick, sympathetic smile.

"I guess you could say that." She looked down to hide her sudden relief. It was easy to make polite noises about being interrupted at dinner, but she'd been worried all week that that Don was only being polite about her need to end things early. Now, looking at his understanding expression, she put her fears to rest. He really didn't hold it against her.

He was adding quietly, "Besides, I still had a good time." His voice was warm and sincere, and she felt her cheeks growing pink. Yeah, she thought, for only half a date, it was really nice.

"So how did it turn out with your patient?" He leaned forward and took a sip of water.

"Oh, it was a false alarm. Still, better to be safe than sorry, right?" She stopped to stifle a large yawn. Her morning Starbucks had apparently worn off. At least it was Friday and she had a light schedule this afternoon.

Don was looking at her with the same concerned expression he'd had in his office last week. "Are you sleeping all right?" he asked.

"Better than I was." She toyed with the straw in her iced tea. Actually, last night had been the only rough night all week. Don had called to tell her that their lunch date might be cut short because of a big operation that had just come up. Then she found herself unable to sleep, for once not because she was reliving the events at the safe house, but because she was wondering what he was going to be doing Friday night and how dangerous it was.

She looked up, determined to change the subject. "So, last week you were telling me about why you joined the FBI."

His look indicated that he knew what she was doing, but he let it slide. "Yeah, that's right."

"Was it right out of college?"

He smiled. "No, not exactly." She gave him a questioning look, and he went on, "I actually went to college on a baseball scholarship, and I played minor league ball for a couple of years."

"Wow." She sat back in her seat. "That's really cool."

He shrugged and reached for a tortilla chip, but she thought she saw a faint flush on his cheeks. "I wasn't that good, or I'd have stayed with it."

"Who did you play for?"

"The Stockton Rangers."

She tried to picture him in a baseball uniform and was pleased with the image that came to mind. "They're a farm team for the Giants, right?"

"You kidding? The Oakland A's. I've been a Dodgers fan since birth, Karen. I couldn't play for the Giants, even on a farm team."

She leaned forward, propping her chin on her hand. "You do know that I grew up near San Francisco, right? Did I mention that my family had season tickets to Candlestick Park?"

He looked at her for a long moment, his face growing serious. Then he leaned back in the booth and shook his head sadly. "Karen, I don't think this is going to work between us."

She swore her heart skipped a beat. Then she saw the teasing gleam in his eye, and she reached out and swatted his arm. "You!"

He was chuckling now, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that delightful smile of his. "Tell you what," he said as he leaned forward. "The Giants are in town in a couple of weeks. I haven't been to see the Dodgers yet this year, and I'd love to see an easy win. Want to come along?"

"Gosh, when you put it that way, how can I refuse?" She looked into his eyes, distracted for a moment by their brown depths. God, the man had gorgeous eyes. Then she recalled her train of thought and gave him a sly grin. "Are you a betting man, Agent Eppes?"

He drew back. "Doctor Fisher!" he said in a tone of mock surprise. "As a federal agent, I have to warn you that placing bets on sporting events is subject to strict regulation and enforcement."

"Then it's a good thing I have you to watch out for me," she returned with an ovely-innocent expression. All of a sudden, she felt like there was a lot riding on how he responded to her line of flirting. That is, assuming he recognized it as such.

He regarded her for a moment, then leaned forward so that his face was only a foot or so away from hers. "What did you have in mind?" he asked in a gravelly voice that would have weakened her knees if she wasn't already sitting down.

Yes, he had definitely picked up on that signal. "Oh, we can start small," she said as breezily as she could manage. "Winner gets to pick what the next date is."

"After the baseball game." When she nodded, he went on, "That would be our fourth date then, right?"

She blinked, then dropped her hand on the table and sat back. Was she presuming too much? "That's right," she said in a slightly less confident tone.

But he was reaching out and grabbing her hand. "That sounds great," he said quietly, reassuringly stroking his thumb across the back of her hand.

Or at least it was reassuring at first. As she looked down at his long fingers draped over hers, she suddenly began to feel a little warm. She glanced up at Don and saw that his expression had changed. His eyes had grown darker, and then his hand tightened around hers. "Karen," he started in that same low voice, "I -- "

A loud buzzing sound from his shirt pocket interrupted whatever it was he was going to say. He closed his eyes, and she was amused to see him mouth an obscenity. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and, giving her an apologetic glance, flipped it open. "Eppes."

His gaze was locked on hers, and she watched as the corners of his mouth tighten as he listened. "Yeah," he said grimly. "No, that's all right. Okay. Yeah, I'll be there in…ten minutes. All right." He closed the phone and gave her a lopsided grin. "I told you it would be my turn next."

She nodded automatically, reassured to some extent that at least the two of them were symmetrical in this respect. "What is it?"

He called the waiter over, then asked that their food be boxed to go as soon as it was ready. "It's something we've got planned for tonight that's going to happen sooner than expected."

She noticed how quickly his professional mask had slipped back on, and she bit back the comments that sprang to her mind, not wanting to sound weak. Instead, she said, "Be careful, Don."

She must not have been hiding her expression as well as she thought, for his features softened as soon as he looked at her. "Hey," he said softly, reaching out and taking her hand again. "Don't worry about me, okay? This is perfectly routine."

She wondered if he would also classify getting shot at while protecting a witness as "routine," but she bit her tongue. They weren't symmetrical after all, she realized. Don would never have to worry about _her_ safety when she got called away from dinner. Considering how they had met, she didn't suppose she could ever stop worrying about his.

They exited the restaurant and walked briskly to the parking garage. Her car was one floor above his, and she walked him to his Suburban, arguing with herself the whole way about whether or not to ask him something. By the time they reached his vehicle, she had made up her mind not to.

Then he turned to her, and she changed her mind again. "Can you do me a favor?" she blurted out. He cocked his head and she went on, "I know this sounds stupid, but…can you please call me when you get home tonight? No matter what time it is? I know you said this is routine, and I know I don't even know what's going on, but something tells me I won't be able to sleep until I…until I know you're okay." She trailed off at the end and folded her arms across her chest.

He took a step closer. "It'll probably be pretty late, you know."

She shrugged one shoulder. "I'm used to having my sleep interrupted."

"Okay. Then I'll call you when I get home." He gave her a small smile, then leaned forward and kissed her cheek, his lips warm as they brushed her skin. "Thanks for lunch. And for being concerned."

After he drew back, they looked at each other for a long moment. Karen suddenly felt her heart pounding, and although the parking garage was too dark to read Don's eyes, she thought she could see the same curiosity and spark of interest that she was feeling. So she took a small step forward, lifting her face ever so slightly. And as he came forward and lowered his head, their lips met in the middle.

"Spark" was a good word, she thought dazedly a moment later, if a bit of an understatement. Both of them had been a bit hesitant at first, but then she slowly snaked an arm around his waist, and he reached up to run a hand through her hair, and she gave a little sigh as their lips slanted across each other. When they eventually pulled apart, he tightened his arms around her and leaned his forehead against hers. "Now I wish I didn't have to leave," he murmured, his low voice sending shivers down her spine.

"I know," she said. "Me too." He leaned forward to kiss her again, and she responded readily, breathing in the masculine scent that was making her head spin while holding him as close to her as she dared. When the kiss ended, she pushed him away firmly. "And if you don't go now, I might not let you."

He gave her another full smile and backed towards his car. "I'll call you tonight."

"Please do. And please, Don, be careful."

She watched him drive away, realizing that if they kept seeing each other, this was likely to keep happening: her worrying about his safety, him not able to tell her the details of what he was doing. Her best friend from college was married to a cop, and she knew it could be a difficult life. She had often wondered if it would be worth it, if she met a man in a similar situation.

Then she thought of Don's kiss, and a slow smile spread across her face. Oh, yes, it would be worth it. Definitely so.


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Part 1.

I really appreciate your reviews, especially Jennifer – you cracked me up! If there's anyone else I haven't thanked over e-mail, well, leave another review and I'll respond. :) I put a lot of work into this, and I'm pleased that you're enjoying it.

oooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 8  
Friday, June 24, 2005  
9:15 P.M.  
Port of Long Beach, Pier J

It had been pouring for the past hour from a highly unusual June thunderstorm. Los Angeles often went from May to November without seeing a drop of rain, but once in a while, the heavens really opened up. Don shifted from one foot to another, trying to stay under his umbrella, as the Japanese crewman opened yet another container and indicated for him to look.

It was as empty of smuggled freon as all the other containers he and his team had examined in the past two hours. The crew had been unfailingly helpful and polite despite the inclement weather, and he wasn't getting the same vibe he had on the "Buir Lake." Considering how unwilling Mick had been to help them at first, it was surprising that the information he had sent them wasn't panning out.

"Thank you," he said to the crewman standing beside him. When the man gestured inquiringly toward the adjacent container, he shook his head. "No, that's okay."

Walking across the deck, he found Terry, who was looking as frustrated and damp as he was. "Anything?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Every container on this ship matches one in the manifest. No one's trying to hide anything, near as I can tell."

"Sorry to bring you out in this weather," he sighed, thinking of how he would much rather have been spending this evening, particularly after the way he and Karen had said goodbye to each other in the parking garage. "We can have them start lifting the ones off the top and look underneath, but I get the feeling we're not going to find anything. Looks like Mick had some faulty information."

"Yeah, I guess so." Her brow was furrowed. "He obviously thought it was important to send to me, though, or he wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of disguising it."

"Maybe they got wind of our coming and put it overboard somewhere."

"How could they have? It's only been fourteen hours since we confirmed this bust, and most of the team wasn't notified till noon."

"Yeah, I know." Then a thought occurred to him, and he slowly raised his head. "What about Mick?"

"Don, why would he tell us about the bust and then warn the smugglers?"

"No, no," he said urgently. "What if he was fed false information to see if he was talking to us? He was worried about being watched the other day; what if he was?"

Terry looked a little sheepish. "I already called Tyler, the agent we have tailing him, an hour ago. He's safely ensconced at home."

Don raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't have anything better to do on a Friday night?"

"Maybe he really got spooked by our visit." She pulled out her cell phone. "Let me give him a call and see how solid his info was."

When a few seconds went by with no answer, Terry's eyes flickered nervously to his. Underneath the pounding of the rain, he heard the distant crackle of a recorded message, and her look became more grim. She punched the "end" button, and then redialed. Same result.

"Let me try Tyler," Don said, pulling out his phone. The phone rang four times before going to voice mail. That wasn't right. An agent on active surveillance was always supposed to answer their phone when it rang. He checked the phone to make sure the storm wasn't interfering with the reception. Then he redialed, his stomach sinking with every unanswered ring.

As he dialed a third time, Don was already looking around to find David, who was about to move from third-in-command to running what was left of the operation. He spied him, and waved for him to come over.

"Don…"

"I know, Terry." Tyler's voice mail came on for the third time, and he flipped his phone closed. "Let me hand things off to David, and we'll go see what's going on, okay?" He gave her a look that was meant to be reassuring, but that he knew was as grim as her own expression.

It looked like the only trap that had been sprung was on them.

ooooooooooooooo

Five minutes after turning over control of the operation to David, Don and Terry were barreling down the Pacific Coast Highway, a second vehicle behind them for backup. It was about ten miles from the port to Huntington Beach, and thanks to the siren on top of the Suburban, it looked like it would take less than fifteen minutes, even with the rain still pouring down.

Terry had checked the clip in her gun twice before Don reached over and put a hand over hers. "It's probably nothing," he said in his most reassuring voice. "Tyler's phone battery probably ran out or something. Maybe the storm cut off his reception."

"You really think so?"

If he thought so, he wouldn't have been driving so fast. But instead he said, "You told me Mick was in the army back home, right? He's a pretty tough guy?"

She sighed. "Yeah, that's right. Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't Special Forces or whatever they call them. That coded message he sent wasn't something the average person would do."

"How'd you know about that picture, anyway?"

"Oh, we went to an exhibition together at the Getty once. It was the closest thing to a date we ever did." The corner of her mouth turned up. "He probably figured that was a particularly memorable evening or something."

The lightless territory of the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station stretched away to the east, matching the dark expanse of the ocean to their right. Don accelerated as the traffic, already minimal because of the weather, decreased further. Five more minutes. "You know where he lives, right?"

"From what he said the other day, I don't think he's moved. Up 21st Street, in two blocks and it's on the left."

"Right." They drove the rest of the way in tense silence, Don switching off the siren and lights as they exited the main highway to avoid alerting anyone to their presence.

"It's the pink stucco on the left." She checked her gun one more time, and he didn't stop her.

Don pulled to a stop behind a Range Rover and killed the lights. Their backup pulled past them, then did a U-turn at the next intersection and parked a few houses away. He checked his gun and vest, both still on from the port. After last week's fiasco, he had figured the extra protection was worth the extra sweating they would bring.

"Is that Tyler's car across the street?" Terry asked quietly.

He squinted through the falling rain at the dark sedan, barely visible in the dim glow of the streetlights. "Could be. There's definitely someone sitting inside."

Weapons in hand, they quietly climbed out of the SUV and made their way across the street, watching each other's backs. The smell of the sea air was sharp in Don's nostrils, and the faint roar of the surf a few blocks away was barely audible over the raindrops. The street was deserted other than themselves, though a few lights were on in some of the small, bungalow-style houses. The pink stucco Terry had pointed out had a faint glow indicating a light was on in the back.

They reached Tyler's car, the other two agents a few steps behind, and Don rapped on the tinted glass. When no one responded, he slowly released the door handle.

The tall, blond-haired man inside was obviously dead. The way his body fell out of the car was a clear sign of that, as was the neat bullet hole in his temple. "Shit," one of the agents behind him said quietly.

Terry was looking towards Mick's house, wiping rain off of her face. "All right, Adams and Bayer, radio in for more backup. Then go up to the front door, but don't enter. Don and I will go around the back. There's a living room in the front, kitchen to the left and dining room behind it. I think that's where the light is coming from. If it becomes necessary to enter, we'll enter from the back door, but be ready for anyone coming your way. The rain is probably loud enough to muffle most sounds from inside."

The other two nodded, both casting a nervous glance at the dead Tyler before crossing the street into the shadow of a tall hedge and making their way back to their vehicle.

Don gently replaced Sam Tyler in his car, then eased the door shut. "Terry, we should really wait for more backup. We don't know how many people we're dealing with here."

"Don, for all we know Mick is already dead!" she hissed back. "If not, every second counts. I'm not waiting for anyone else."

"All right, be careful. I've got your back."

They crept down the short driveway, staying in the shadow of the house and ignoring the rain that was soaking through their clothing. Around the back, they crouched down to avoid the window of what Terry had said was the dining room, although the drawn shades prevented Don from seeing what was inside. Then they heard a noise coming from inside, and both froze.

There was a cracking noise, followed by what sounded suspiciously like a grunt of pain. Don exchanged glances with Terry, then leaned over and breathed in her ear, "What's the floor plan?"

She whispered back, "The back door next to us opens into the laundry room. Dining room's to the right, bathroom's to the left. There's only room for one of us to enter at a time."

He gave her a worried look. "That's not good."

She rolled her eyes. "I know, but it's what we've got to work with."

Her voice had risen a little on the last few words, and he grabbed her arm. He opened his mouth, then froze at a sound above them. Someone was pulling up the shade. They flattened themselves back against the house, hoping that whoever was inside wouldn't look straight down.

"_Shto eta_?" a voice called from inside. Don could see a shadow spreading out along the grass from the window above their heads.

"_Slushala inogdaa_," came the response from right above them.

The first voice grew closer, along with its shadow. "_Shto videtye_?"

Then there was a crashing sound from farther inside, and the heads of both figures whipped around. A pistol fired. The screen door slammed open, and someone came stumbling outside into the rain.

"Mick!" Terry lunged sideways and grabbed his arm, pulling him towards them.

The Ukrainian had blood running down the side of his leg, and he was cradling his right hand with his left arm. But he didn't seem surprised to see them, or at least he took it completely in stride. "Two in back, two in front," he murmured, ducking down behind the two agents.

"Just like us," Don muttered as the first man appeared in the doorway.

The Russian saw them almost immediately, and raised his pistol. Don and Terry both fired, and he fell back into the house, clutching at his chest. A second man leaned around the corner long enough to squeeze off a shot, and then they heard his footsteps retreating into the house.

Gunshots coming from the front of the building meant that Bayer and Adams were engaged, too. "Okay, Mick, you stay here. Terry, let's go through the house and clean up."

Once inside, they took turns providing cover around each doorway. The second man was waiting for them behind the kitchen counter, and as he popped up, he got off a round that sent Don staggering back against the wall. Wincing at the blow, Don fired back, sending the Russian sprawling on the floor. He rubbed at his chest, knowing if his vest was thick enough to stop a bullet, he wouldn't be able to feel the pressure of his hand. Still, he was going to be sore there tomorrow. He snatched up the dead man's gun and tucked it away in his belt before nodding to Terry.

The gunfire from the front had died down, and they approached cautiously, knowing it could mean anything. To their relief, they found Bayer handcuffing one suspect, with Adams training his pistol on another who had already taken one shot in the leg. "You guys all right?" Don asked.

"Thanks to God and Kevlar," John Bayer said, snapping the cuffs shut before wiping his wet hair off his brow.

"I hear you," Don agreed.

Terry had disappeared into the back, and now she returned, supporting Mick, who had his arm thrown over her shoulder. "You okay?" Don asked him.

Mick nodded tiredly, his handsome features drawn with pain. "I am glad you came, though." He indicated his right hand, which he was still holding carefully. "There were still eight fingers to break."

Terry gave him a gentle squeeze. "We'll get that taken care of right away, Mick. That and the graze on your leg. There should be EMTs on the way."

He looked Don in the eye. "I suppose I do not have a choice anymore about your protective custody, do I?"

Don shook his head. "Afraid not." The welcome sound of sirens outside was drawing closer as he spoke.

Mick looked down at the man handcuffed on the floor, who gave him a glare and spat something at him in Russian. Bayer gave him a none-too-gentle nudge in the side with his foot, and he went quiet.

For a long moment, Mick regarded the man who had been holding him captive. Then he looked up and spoke crisply. "I suppose you also will be wanting information from me?"

"Not as a precondition of protecting you, but if you have something to tell us, we'd appreciate it."

He nodded slowly. "Can you walk with me to the ambulance?"

Don exchanged a glance with Terry, asking her to keep an eye on him, and she reassured him that she would, all without saying a word. "Go on ahead. I'll be out in a second."

As soon as two more agents had entered and Don had given them directions as to how best to assist Bayer and Adams, he went outside to find that the rain was tapering off. Mick was seated at the back door of one ambulance, his pant leg cut open to above his knee. Terry was standing off to the side, watching him as the medics cleaned the gash on his leg where the bullet had almost missed him.

He looked up as Don approached. "I think I can help you quite a bit," he said quietly, "but I need a promise from you. I need to know I will not be in trouble for anything I tell you."

"You want immunity from prosecution." When Mick nodded, he rubbed his jaw. "I can talk to my boss about it tomorrow."

Mick was shaking his head. "Tomorrow will be too late. I know places that you need to look, and by morning, they will be empty. I need your word."

He looked at Terry and tilted his head to the side. She followed him a few steps away, then spoke in a low tone, "Don, you have to. We're the ones responsible for him being in danger and being injured. And if we don't find out what he knows and act on it tonight, it will probably be too late."

"You know him, Terry. Do you think he's bluffing?"

She gazed over at Mick, whose face remained impassive as an EMT started to set his broken fingers. "I don't even know him well enough to know what kind of illegal activities he might have done. But he's more serious than I've ever seen him, and I think he deserves everything we can give him."

"All right. But if Merrick gives me any crap about making a decision like this in the field, I can tell him it's based on your professional evaluation of an informant?"

The ambulance's lights were still flashing, and the strange red-and-yellow shadows they cast through the drizzle made it hard for him to read her face. But her voice was firm as she said, "Yes, you can."

They walked back over to Mick, their feet crunching on the gravel at the side of the road. His leg was bandaged and his hand splinted, and he stood up as they approached. Terry hurried to his side when he started to waver, but then he stood up straight and gave her a small but reassuring smile.

"You have a deal," Don said, extending his left hand.

They shook hands, and Mick unexpectedly grinned. "Get paper and a pen, and be ready to call your office. I think there will be a lot of FBI agents called out of their beds tonight."


	9. Chapter 9

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Part 1. All offers of baked goods for more frequent postings are gladly accepted.

Hang on to your hats...

ooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 9  
Friday, July 1  
2:45 P.M.  
FBI Field Office, Los Angeles

Don hung up the phone with a satisfied sigh. He gave Terry a thumbs-up as he crossed the room to write a big black X over a photograph hanging amidst a collage of lists, maps, and photos. That made thirty; only ten more to go.

Over the course of the past week, Mick had provided them with a wealth of information. He told them he had been approached about a year ago about earning some extra money working on late night shipments. His initial refusal had been countered with a threat of information being leaked to the authorities that would result in his deportation. Whether the information was true or not was irrelevant; the newly-formed Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of the Department of Homeland Security had increased its scrutiny of immigrants to such an extent that they wouldn't examine reports of contact with certain Middle Eastern countries too closely. And since Mick wouldn't exactly find a warm welcome waiting for him from the Russian Army, he felt he had no choice but to go along.

He hadn't done much more than drive a few trucks with containers from the docks to their final destination. But he remembered those final destinations, from warehouses a few miles from the ports to a refrigerator repair shop seventy miles out in Palm Springs. FBI teams had closed in on all of those locations, and seven out of the eight had turned up gold. The number of arrests was up to thirty, with ten more suspects identified. While they hadn't seized huge amounts of smuggled freon, they were putting a substantial dent in the Russians' distribution network.

Of course, Mick was just one participant. Even though Don's on-the-spot offer of immunity had later been translated into a more binding agreement that was available to all takers, many of the arrested individuals had refused to say a word. Don even asked Mick to try to talk them into his way of thinking, that information in exchange for protection was better than being defenseless and being thought a snitch anyway. But only a few had taken them up on the offer.

One of those was Captain Balandra of the "Buir Lake." He hadn't had a whole lot of information to share, since the shipment they had confiscated had been his first voyage to the U.S. as well as his first smuggling trip. His first trip for whom, he couldn't tell them. Not because he wasn't willing, but because he couldn't get it across with his stilted English. He said that the people who hired him in Manila "talked funny," but that was all he could say. Terry had hit on the idea of asking Mick to speak in Russian to see if that sounded familiar, but the Filipino firmly shook his head.

While that front of the investigation was stalled, there were other areas that were beginning to bear fruit. Don strolled over to the corner of the bullpen, where Charlie was typing madly on his laptop, to check on one of those lines of investigation. "Find anything new, buddy?"

The mathematician didn't look up from his work, saying only, "Give me one second."

"You're going to wear out those keys if you keep this up," Don said, dropping into a chair next to him. "We've got plenty of computer programmers on staff here, you know."

"I've almost got it…" Charlie frowned at the screen for a moment. Then his face cleared, and he made a few final keystrokes. He sat back in his chair triumphantly and turned to Don. "Want to see?"

"Do I want to see your lines of code that only a programmer could love? Not really, Charlie."

His brother made a face at him. "If you don't want to hear about the way I've managed to pinpoint the location of the missing freon, then fine."

"Wait. Missing freon?" Don rested his elbows on the armrests and leaned slightly forward. "We aren't sure where all of the confiscated shipment was headed, but what's missing?"

"A lot." Charlie's laptop showed a map of greater L.A., with a pattern of red dots that closely followed the pattern of industrial land uses throughout the region. "Based on the information you've gotten from the people you've interrogated, I wrote a subroutine to calculate the amount of material that's likely to have been brought in by all of these ships over the last five years. Based on estimates from Caltrans and the EPA of the number of cars, refrigerators, and pieces of industrial equipment in the area that are old enough to use freon as a coolant, I came up with an estimated demand."

"And then you compared that to the amount of permitted freon based on EPA data," Don guessed. When his brother nodded, he went on, "We already did that, Charlie. We came up with a significant gap between demand and supply, which is why we know that smuggling is going on."

Charlie shook his head. "That gap has persisted over five years. It's not natural." He started ticking points off on his fingers. "Smuggling is one of the purest, most free markets you can have, since it's obviously unregulated. It's also an extremely lucrative market. At the same time, demand has decreased as older equipment is phased out. Given those three factors, supply should have increased to meet demand, but it hasn't."

"Yeah, well, we might have managed to catch a few of these shipments over the years, you know."

"No offense, Don, but the U.S. government has barely made a dent. According to my model results --" he clicked on the laptop screen and pointed to a number -- "there's about ten million pounds of freon that have been smuggled into the U.S. through Southern California, but not used."

Don leaned back and regarded him seriously. "If that's right, Charlie, that's a real problem. Can you run your calculations by some of our people?"

"Sure. But before you get too worried…" he trailed off as he clicked on the map again. "I've mapped the locations that you've raided in the last week. Each of these red dots corresponds to a site. The larger the dot, the more freon was seized. The total is about a quarter of what there should be."

"So even with Mick and the others, we're missing a lot of locations."

"Or one big one. My theory, and I haven't managed to prove it yet, is that the smugglers are not just meeting demand, they're creating it. You've arrested a number of Russians suspected of having mafia ties." Don nodded. "They account for less than two million pounds of freon. If you extrapolate the totals on this map to include data from the people in custody who won't cooperate, plus a rough estimate of how many haven't been arrested yet, you still fall short by 27 percent. I think there's a stockpile that's been created to keep the price high, and that's where the missing freon is."

Don gestured at the screen. "So have you been able to figure out where it is?"

"I have a pretty good idea." He typed for a few seconds, and an overlay of yellow spread across portions of the map, encompassing all of the red dots and more area besides. "There's a few outliers, but based on the average distance that Mick and the others drove, the stockpile should be in this area. Now, if you've hit the organization hard enough, they might have changed their pattern, but it's unlikely they could have moved a large stockpile so quickly."

"Heisenberg again, huh?" Charlie beamed at him, and he returned the smile. "See, I pay attention to all that math stuff you talk about."

"Heisenberg is actually physics stuff, but I get your point."

Don squinted at the map and did a rough estimate in his head. "I hate to say it, but that's got to be a quarter of Los Angeles County."

"But you figure the stockpile is somewhere they're going to drive frequently. There are only a few locations where each of the drivers went." He pressed a key, and the yellow area shrank. "Then I talked to David, who was looking into property owned by our suspects. Once you add that in -- " he paused to press another key -- "you're down to three locations. One in Long Beach and two in L.A."

"But according to your map, we've already searched one of the L.A. locations."

"That's right. So there's a very high probability that the stockpile is either here," he tapped a point on the map to the north of the Port of Long Beach," or here," and he tapped a spot a few miles to the northwest, within Los Angeles city limits.

"That's fantastic." Don's mind spun for a moment while he absorbed the new information and figured out what to do with it. "All right, Charlie, can you e-mail me a copy of that map, and print one out, too? I've got a meeting with Jason Ramos from Customs later this afternoon to coordinate our efforts. I'm sure he'd love to see this map. Then I'd better start putting some teams together for tonight."

"You're not going to check it out right now?" Charlie sounded surprised.

Don gestured at the map on his screen. "They're both on heavily traveled arterials, and it's almost rush hour. If we're really talking a major stockpile here, it's best to have as few people around as possible in case someone puts up a fight."

Charlie nodded, then paused when he noticed the time in the lower right-hand corner of his computer screen. "Uh, Don, is that meeting of yours at the port?"

"It's actually at the Customs offices in downtown Long Beach. Why?"

His brother looked up at him with a slightly pleading expression. "I'm supposed to meet a professor from Long Beach City College to talk about their summer program for advanced high school math students. I'm supposed to be there in thirty minutes, but there's no way the Blue Line can get me there that fast. Can I get a ride with you at least part of the way?"

Don frowned. His meeting was also in half an hour. "Yeah, as long as traffic's not too bad."

"Great." He closed the laptop and slid it into his backpack. "Then let's go."

ooooooooooooooooooooo

Twenty minutes later, they were exiting the freeway onto the Pacific Coast Highway, better known as PCH. Though the name implied a glamorous beachfront roadway, here the road cut through an old part of town lined with a mix of industrial and fast food establishments. It wasn't exactly an attractive streetscape, though it was every bit as much a part of California as the palm trees and the sand.

When he'd called Ramos from the car to pass on the news about the missing freon, the customs official had insisted on getting out there to look at the sites Charlie had identified as soon as possible. When Don voiced his objections about the traffic, Ramos reminded him they still didn't know who had leaked information about Don's informant, meaning that there might be someone on the inside. Moving faster was better, he insisted.

Don had grudgingly agreed, deciding that once he dropped Charlie off, he'd call the team he had started to assemble and get them down there. Ramos had insisted on using his own men to investigate the site in Long Beach, and Don had acquiesced, reminding him that they should synchronize their assaults in case both places were bases of operation for the smugglers.

"There it is," Don said as they passed a low-slung brick building set back from the street. "Long Beach Chemical Supply."

Charlie looked up from the textbook on his lap for the first time during the drive, craning his head to look out the back. "Looks like there's some kind of activity going on in the back. I thought you said the Customs people were going to wait?"

Don slammed on the brakes and swerved towards the curb, earning a one-fingered salute from the car behind him. He backed up the Suburban and looked down the alleyway next to the brick building in question. Sure enough, there were two white vans parked at the rear of the building, emblazoned with the U.S. Customs logo. Three men were loading tanks of some sort into the vans, following the shouted commands from someone at the back of the building.

"Son of a -- " Don slammed his palm against the steering wheel. "I told him to wait. That's the point of _coordinated_ interagency activity. What if that's not the whole stockpile, and they got a warning out to the other location?" He sighed, and his shoulders slumped. "This probably won't take very long, if you want to wait in the car."

"Um, I can just get out here." Charlie pointed down the street. "It's only a few more blocks."

"You're sure?" When Charlie nodded, Don went on, "I guess I won't be able to give you a ride back, since I'll be checking on the site in L.A. after I chew out Mr. Ramos here."

"Hey, at least it looks like they found something." Charlie picked up his backpack and opened the door.

"You mean at least it looks like you were right," Don replied knowingly. Among Charlie's many talents was a gift for modesty.

"That, too." He stepped out onto the pavement and looked back up. "Be careful, Don."

"I always am." Don waved him off as he shut the door.

Then he turned the corner, pulling to a stop past the alleyway behind the buildings that fronted on PCH. Looking back towards the chemical supply company, he saw the confiscation of the freon continuing, now with both the customs officers and a couple of men dressed in workman's coveralls doing the loading. Presumably those guys were with the smugglers, meant to be handcuffed later. A little unorthodox, but it was probably easier to keep an eye on them if they were doing some of the work, too.

He reached for his phone to call David and get the second operation going. But when he lifted the phone to his ear, all he heard was a triple beep, and then the descending tones that indicated the device was shutting down. Damn. He'd forgotten to recharge it this afternoon. Well, maybe he could borrow Ramos's phone. The man was obviously in a hurry to get things going; how he'd gotten a full team here so fast and with such instant success, Don didn't know. But it was pretty impressive, despite the lousy timing.

He climbed out of the SUV and started down the alleyway. As he got closer, he could see someone waiting up on the loading dock, talking to another person inside the building in a language Don didn't understand. It looked like Ramos. The Customs agent was facing away from the loading dock, and Don was about to call out to him when he noticed something strange.

There was one Customs officer standing off to the side, watching the rest of the men load the freon into the two white vans. The gun he was holding was pointed at the two men in coveralls who were emerging from the van, and he gestured to them to continue into the building. But as the next man carrying a tank of freon came out, even though he was wearing a Customs uniform, the gun was pointed at him, too.

Don flattened himself back against the wall. He peered around the corner and watched as the man carrying the tank shot a glare at the one holding a gun on him. Then the gunman said something in a loud voice, and Ramos turned to look. "Hurry up, Williams," he called. "You should have volunteered when I asked. You could have been on the other side of the gun."

Yep, there was someone on the inside, all right. This explained a lot, Don thought as his mind raced, from the Customs agent's original reluctance to thoroughly search the "Buir Lake" to his hurry to get to this site and start unloading the stockpiled freon. The only question now was, how many of the Customs agents were with Ramos and the smugglers?

He took a deep breath and drew his gun for reassurance. He'd get back to the car, get the hell out of there, and find a damn pay phone to call in what he'd seen. Then he'd have to keep an eye on things here. Maybe he could catch up with Charlie and borrow his phone. Long Beach City College couldn't have that many math professors, right? It should be fairly easy to locate his brother.

He took a few sideways steps until he was out of sight of the loading dock. Then he turned towards his vehicle --

-- and came face to face with a semi-automatic pistol pointed at him from about six feet away. The man holding it was dressed in the same Customs uniform as everyone else. "Your gun, please," he said with a slight Japanese accent.

Don paused for a minute, considering his options. Then the click of the safety being released made it clear that he didn't really have any options. He carefully tossed his gun to the ground, well off to the side. The man's eyes tracked it for a second, then returned to him. "Hands on your head," he commanded. "Then turn around."

He slowly obeyed, his scalp prickling. When the gun barrel in his back prodded him forward, he moved towards the loading dock. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back underneath his dress shirt, and it wasn't just from the heat of the sun overhead.

As they came into view, Ramos turned around. His surprised expression quickly turned to one of resignation. "I told you, you weren't needed here, Agent Eppes."

He noticed out of the corner of his eye that the loading activity had stopped, but he ignored that and focused on the man standing up on the dock, his arms folded. "How long?" Don asked, his voice simmering with anger, both at himself for being tricked and at the Customs agent for what he'd done. "How long have you been doing this?"

"Longer than you might think," came the reply. The man behind him prodded him to keep moving, and they walked up the few steps to the loading dock. Two men in coveralls stood aside to let them pass before scurrying ahead into the building.

Don came to a sudden stop as the realization hit him. "Paul Everett," he said harshly. "I told you who our informant was, didn't I?"

"I was fairly confident that I knew, but yes, you confirmed it. The other one, the Ukrainian, wasn't hard to smoke out, either. I hope you don't think you can actually protect him."

"It'll be easier now that we know the _yakuza _are in on it, too." The Japanese mafia were as feared as the Russian variety, though they didn't often operate out of their home territory. Don had been wondering if they were involved ever since Andrea confirmed that the payment for the freon had originated in Osaka. Looking around and noticing the ethnicity of the men with guns compared to those who were doing the loading, he was sure he was right. It also explained Captain Balandra's funny-sounding contacts in the Philippines. "How long have you been cooperating with them and the Russians, anyway? Since your trip to Japan? Or before that?"

The corner of Ramos's mouth turned up. "You're the only one who knows of our involvement, Agent Eppes. And it's going to stay that way." He jerked his head towards the brick building behind him. "We still need to have our meeting. Perhaps I will tell you in exchange for your information."

He dug in his heels. "Like hell I'm going to tell you anything."

The punch to his lower back was not unexpected, but it still hurt. He bent over and tried to catch his breath, his hands now clenched into fists at his sides. The gun was pressing into his back right at the place he'd been hit.

"I insist," came the steely reply. "Your phone call this afternoon was not exactly welcome. I would have found out from you anyway how much progress your team had made, but you seem to have made a connection I didn't expect. Or, rather, you said it was a consultant of yours who made that connection. I need to know who that consultant is and where to find them."

Oh, this could get much worse. "No," he said adamantly.

Ramos's dark eyes narrowed. "You _will_ tell me, one way or another. You said in your phone call that you hadn't yet passed on your information to any other agents. I need to know what they do and do not know, including this consultant of yours."

Don stared at him for a long moment. "Go to hell."

Ramos gave a short nod, and then Don briefly saw stars as the gun barrel struck the back of his head. He put a hand up to his scalp, and it came away sticky. He could feel a trail of blood running down below his collar, and he took a deep breath to steady himself.

The other man was regarding him calmly. "We don't have a lot of time. I hope you don't make things too difficult." Then he gestured, and the man behind him started pulling him towards the building entrance.

The foremost thought in his mind as he was marched inside was gratefulness that his brother had taken off on foot for the college instead of waiting for him in the car. At least Charlie was safe.

On the other hand, Don thought as he entered the building with the gun still digging into his back, he was screwed.


	10. Chapter 10

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Part 1. Please review; you _can_ make a difference! ;)

oooooooooooooooo

Chapter 10  
Friday, July 1  
3:25 P.M.  
Long Beach City College

Charlie bounded up the last two steps and around the corner into the wide hallway. The walk to the college had been as short as he had expected, and he was even a few minutes early for his meeting. The college had instituted a summer camp of sorts for promising high school math students, and he had met with Professor Sam Carlton once before to share his own expertise from running a similar program at CalSci. The camp was about halfway over, and he had promised to check in, see how things were going, and offer some suggestions for the remaining weeks.

He heard voices coming from Carlton's office, so he sat down on the bench in the hallway to wait. He opened his backpack to take out the number theory text he had been perusing in anticipation of his fall classes. It wasn't his best subject, but he had found that he learned a lot when he taught classes outside his area of expertise. He'd found over the years that it really was true that you didn't learn something until you had to teach it to someone else. So he was giving number theory a shot. The book had also given him a few ideas for the City College summer program, and he was looking forward to showing them to Sam.

Except the book wasn't there. He stopped rifling through his bag, leaned his head back against the wall, and tried to reconstruct the last few minutes. He had been reading the book in the car, they had gotten off the freeway and seen the chemical company, he had put the book down on the floor for a moment, and…he didn't remember picking it back up. He'd simply grabbed his bag and taken off. Well, it was fortunate that he could remember most of the ideas he'd had, and Sam probably had a copy of the same book that he could borrow.

Then he had another thought, and he groaned. Now he remembered using the notes for today's meeting, including the evaluations and lessons learned from the CalSci program, as a bookmark in the number theory textbook. Which meant he wasn't going to be of much use. He sighed. At least he knew that Don was just down the street, even though he would probably have to hurry to get there before his brother took off. Hopefully he could get there and back while Sam wrapped up the discussion he was currently engaged in. He knocked on the open door, gave a quick explanation to Sam, and took off.

As he exited the main college building and looked down PCH, he didn't see the black Suburban. But then, he thought he remembered the sound of the vehicle turning behind him onto a side street. He dug his cell phone out of his pack and speed-dialed Don's number. When there was no answer, he shrugged and tucked the phone in his front jeans pocket. Don had probably turned it off so he wouldn't be disturbed talking to the Customs agents.

As he came up to the side street before the block where the chemical supply company was, he looked to the side and saw Don's SUV parked beyond the alley. He was sure he wouldn't be so lucky as to find the vehicle unlocked, and it was going to be a little embarrassing to interrupt Don and explain his situation. Being driven around town by your big brother when you were nearly thirty years old had its awkward moments, for both parties.

He strode down the side street and turned into the alley. If Don had parked here, he was probably out back somewhere. He could see a couple of white vans with the Customs logo on them, and as he came closer, he saw two men busy loading a tank of gas into one. Behind them was a guy with a gun, and as the loading dock came into view, he saw –

Charlie's heart skipped a beat, and he ducked backwards, unknowingly imitating Don's earlier position against the brick wall. He stared ahead for a minute, his mind trying to process the image he had seen. Was that really his brother being held at gunpoint? His heart started racing, and he forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. It must be someone else who looked like Don, he told himself, one of the workers at the store or one of the smugglers.

He ever-so-cautiously peered around the corner again, looking at each of the three men near the vans to make sure their attention was focused elsewhere. Only then did he inch forward and look at the three men up on the loading dock. One, a short Hispanic man in a Customs uniform, was saying something about a phone call and a consultant. Facing him was another Customs officer, his gun in the back of a man who was wearing a white shirt like Don had been.

And then his brother's voice rang out, loud and clear. "Go to hell."

Charlie's fist clenched as the man struck Don in the head with his gun. He swallowed as he saw a thin trickle of red working its way down the back of Don's white shirt. And he watched as Don was shoved inside the building, the threats from the Hispanic man ringing in his ears.

Then he started backing up, very slowly and carefully so that he wouldn't make a sound. He moved a little more quickly the farther away he got, and once he had reached the side street, he took off at a dead run, not stopping until he had gone a full two blocks. Panting, he pulled the phone out of his pocket and hurriedly dialed Terry's office number, praying she'd be in.

"Agent Lake."

Thank God. The traffic noise made her voice faint, and he pressed the button to increase the volume. "Terry, it's Charlie. I'm in Long Beach with Don, and he's been captured."

Her voice was sharp. "Charlie? What do you mean, he's been captured?"

He dropped down onto a bus stop bench and tried to catch his breath. "He let me off at City College, but I left something in the car, and when I went back to get it I saw him being held at gunpoint by the Customs people. I guess they were in on it all along." He paused, thinking of the many ways the investigation could have been hindered if one of the major investigators was one of the smugglers.

"Just a minute." He heard her voice shift away from the phone, barking commands at David and whoever else was in the vicinity. Then she was back. "Charlie, where exactly is Don? Where are you?"

"He's at the Long Beach site on the map I made." Then he remembered no one else had seen the map except Don. Ramos's words suddenly rang in his head. _He_ was the consultant they were looking for.

He swallowed and spoke more rapidly. "It's Long Beach Chemical Supply, on the Pacific Coast Highway just off the 710. I'm about two blocks away by City College. I don't think anyone saw me."

"Good." Her voice was businesslike. "Stay where you are. Better yet, go into the college and stay in a public place. We'll be there in fifteen minutes."

"Okay." He looked back down the street, as if he could see anything from where he sat.

"Charlie, I mean it. Don't go anywhere near where they've got Don. If they get you, too, that only makes things harder. We'll be there as soon as we can." Then she hung up.

He closed the phone. Across the street, he could see the window of Sam Carlton's office. He shuddered to think that if the textbook had been in his backpack like it was supposed to, he'd be happily chatting away up there, unaware that just a short distance away, his brother was –

He shook his head to cut off that train of thought. Terry and the rest of the team were on their way, and Don would be fine. The vision of his brother being struck in the head flashed across his sight, and he closed his eyes as if that would make it go away.

His mind was churning through a series of difficult arguments. Terry had said to stay inside, to stay away. But that was _Don_ being hurt. On the other hand, if he had heard the Customs agent right, the man wanted to know where Charlie was. Which meant he should keep himself safe and wait for the cavalry.

He tried for a minute to think like an FBI agent. What would Don do? He would wait for backup and not put himself in danger needlessly. Or would he? Wouldn't he say, no, that's my brother, and he needs my help?

Charlie stood up abruptly and dropped the phone in his backpack before slinging the bag over his shoulders. As far as Don knew, he was alone in there. He had to do what he could to help him, even if it was only to scout out the location for the FBI team that was on its way. If all he did was stand by and waited, it would kill him.

He ignored the voice in his head that said that going back might kill him, too.

oooooooooooooooo

Five minutes later, his heart pounding and his hands shaking, Charlie was wishing he had listened to Terry. He crept up to the front door of the chemical supply company, figuring that the back entrance was pretty much out. The store had a "Closed" sign on the door, but when he tried the knob he found it unlocked. He opened it as quietly as he could and slipped inside, gently pulling the door closed behind him.

The lights were off, but he could see a long counter in front of him, with tall silver tanks clustered against one wall, and a doorway behind the counter leading to the rest of the building. He made his way around the counter, pausing when he heard voices from the back rooms. A door slammed shut, and he moved forward again, cautiously peering into the hallway.

He saw a doorway at the end leading out to the loading dock. On either side of the hallway were two doors. The far one on the left was closed, and he could hear voices coming from behind that door. Don must be in there.

Charlie took a deep breath. He should turn around right now and get out of there. But then he thought he should check out the other rooms to make sure they were empty. More information for Terry's team when they got there, he told himself. So he crept forward down the hallway, looking inside each of the open doors and finding empty offices.

Then a door slammed behind him, and he whirled around, heart in his throat. The front door banged again, and he realized he hadn't shut it completely. A gust of wind must have caught it, and now the blinds were fluttering with a metallic tinkling sound.

"What was that?" he heard clearly through the closed door.

Shit. He dashed into the empty office to his right, easing the door shut and leaning against it. Now his heart was pounding, and he clutched the strap of his backpack to try and stop his hands from shaking.

He heard the door in the adjoining room open, and footsteps strode past his door. The front door slammed, and he heard the lock turn. "The guy working the front didn't shut the door all the way when he closed up," a voice called out.

Someone spoke right outside the door, and Charlie jumped. "He must have been hoping to slip out later. Find him out back and get him to set the alarm. No one's getting out that way." It was the same voice he had heard from the loading dock, and given the man's appearance, he assumed it was Jason Ramos, the man Don had been going to meet.

Charlie closed his eyes. He really should have listened to Terry. Now he was stuck in here until the cavalry showed up. If anyone found him in here, he was toast. He quietly turned the lock, giving himself at least that small amount of protection. Then he started looking around the room for a place to hide.

The office was small: one desk, piled high with papers; two metal folding chairs in front of the desk and a plush office chair behind it; two short filing cabinets against the wall; and a surprising amount of light despite the fact that the switch by the door was off. Then he realized that the top foot of the wall was actually glass, not wallboard. If he stood on top of the filing cabinet, he could see into the adjacent office. He quietly stepped onto a chair, then onto the two-drawer cabinet, and carefully peered into the room next door.

It looked like a conference room of sorts, with a formica table that had several bankers' boxes of files sitting on top of it. A number of cheap office chairs were scattered around the table. Don was seated in one of them, his hands restrained behind the back of the chair. The flash of metal that Charlie saw told him it was probably with his own handcuffs. A bruise was forming on his right cheekbone, the only side that Charlie could see. A tall man was looming beside him, holding a gun down at his side.

"Now, where were we, Agent Eppes?" Ramos's voice came from the doorway, and Charlie instinctively ducked down. They probably wouldn't think to look up, but he still didn't want to give himself away.

Don didn't say anything, and Charlie heard the Customs agent respond, "Oh, that's right. You were telling me about this consultant who led you here."

"Actually, I wasn't." Charlie waited a beat, and sure enough, there was the sound of a fist striking flesh. The sound was muffled by the glass, but it was still enough to make him wince in sympathy.

Don, don't be a smart-ass, he silently pled with his brother. Just hang in there. He looked down at his watch. Only eight more minutes, if Terry's estimate was accurate.

"You're making things difficult." Ramos paused. "Tom?"

Charlie held his breath, but didn't hear anything. He slowly looked back over the wall, and he froze. The man next to Don had put the gun against his left temple. Don briefly closed his eyes, and Charlie saw his Adam's apple move as he swallowed. Then he opened his eyes and stared back at his interrogator, not saying a word.

Ramos pounded a fist on the table. "Who is this consultant? Where can I find him?"

Don's voice was level. "I don't know."

Ramos gestured angrily, and Tom drove a fist into Don's stomach. As he bent over, the man yanked his head back up by the hair, pressing the gun into his temple again. "I'm growing tired of this, Agent Eppes. Why are you going to so much trouble to protect someone who's not even a colleague?"

Don's grimace of pain was unmistakable, and he kept trying to draw a deep breath and failing. But he kept his defiant gaze locked on the Hispanic man as he wheezed, "None of your business."

Ramos considered him for a moment. Charlie's fists clenched tighter until his knuckles started to hurt, as if by inflicting pain on himself, he could somehow make up for what Don was enduring for his sake. He berated himself again for allowing his escape route to be cut off. If they found him here, everything Don was going through was for nothing.

Ramos was speaking again, and his voice had taken a tone of false forgetfulness. "Actually, it just occurred to me. I don't even need your help." He took a cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number, keeping his gaze locked on Don's as he did so. "Hello, FBI Field Office?"

Charlie saw Don's eyes narrow, and he swallowed. Had the Customs agent been toying with his brother this entire time? What was he doing?

"Yes, this is Jason Ramos with U.S. Customs. I need to get in touch with one of your consultants who's been working with Special Agent Don Eppes on the freon smuggling case." Don opened his mouth, and the man standing beside him released the safety on the gun he was holding against his head. Don stayed silent, his furious gaze focused on Ramos.

"Charles Eppes, you say?" Ramos was giving Don a cold smile. Then he wrote something down on a piece of paper. "Thank you very much. You've been most helpful." He ended the call and regarded his captive with a satisfied air. "Well, that explains a lot, Agent Eppes. A family member?"

"My brother," Don reluctantly growled. The man beside him lowered his gun, and Charlie let out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding. He checked his watch. Six more minutes.

"That answers one question," Ramos said. "The next question is, where is he?"

Don remained grimly silent, and Charlie tensed. Here we go again, he thought. But no. Ramos was looking down at the piece of paper on the desk as he started to enter digits on his phone.

Charlie's brow furrowed, and then he caught his breath as the realization hit him. He frantically jumped off the filing cabinet, landing as softly as he could on the tile floor. Then he dove for his backpack, zipping open the front compartment. His phone was about to ring. If that happened while he was in this room, he was dead, and so was Don.

He cursed himself for not turning off the phone after talking to Terry, or at least turning the volume back down. Some FBI agent he would make! All of the times he had sternly reminded his students about turning off their cell phones in class, and here he was with "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" about to come blaring out and betray him to a bunch of armed men. He would have laughed if he hadn't been scared to death. And why wasn't the phone in the place where he normally put it?

He zipped open the second pocket. "Thank God," he muttered as the glint of silver caught his eye. He grabbed the phone, flipped it open, then realized if he turned it off, the shut-down music would sound just as loudly as the ringtone. So he frantically paged through the menus until he had turned the sound from "ring" to "vibrate."

As his finger left the key, the phone started quietly buzzing in his hand.

Charlie sank to the floor, clutching the phone to his chest, feeling his heart thumping through his t-shirt as the phone vibrated against his chest with Ramos's call. After the buzzing stopped, he still sat there, willing himself to calm down.

Next time, he was staying put when the FBI told him to stay.


	11. Chapter 11

Disclaimer and beta thanks in Chapter 1. Thanks to everyone who has reviewed: you're awesome. If you haven't reviewed yet, what are you waiting for? This is almost the last chapter:)

ooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 11  
Friday, July 1  
3:50 P.M.  
Long Beach Chemical Supply Company

Don watched as Ramos dialed Charlie's number, then left a message when no one answered. Charlie must have turned his phone off while he was in his meeting at the college. He only hoped his brother would try to call the office first before responding to Ramos's request to meet him. If Charlie showed up at the Customs office unaware of what was going on… Don really didn't want to think about that.

Of course, his own predicament didn't bear much thinking about, either. With his hands cuffed behind him, two armed men in the room and one more outside supervising the loading of the freon, and no one who knew where he was, he wasn't sure how it could get much worse. He'd already been knocked around by the goon standing next to him, and he was sure there was more where that came from. Now that Ramos had identified Charlie, he was sure to have more questions about what the FBI knew about his operation. Don knew if he stayed completely silent, he wouldn't be of any more use to the smugglers. But if he told them too much too soon, he'd wind up just as dead. Deciding how much to tell them meant walking a pretty fine line.

His headache wasn't making it any easier to think. The thump to the back of his head must have been stronger than he'd initially thought, since his vision kept blurring periodically. The swelling around his right eye from a punch he'd received a few minutes ago didn't help, either.

"So, where is he?"

Don lifted his head to look at Jason Ramos. Here we go again, he thought as he braced himself. "I don't know."

Another blow to his midriff resulted in a cracking sound that made him wince. "Where is he?" came the question again.

Running over options in his head as he tried to catch his breath, he decided that maybe a wild goose chase was the best strategy. At least it would get one of the goons out of the way. "I don't know. But," he hurried on with a sidelong glance at the man next to him, "I know where he was half an hour ago."

Ramos planted his hands on the table and leaned forward. "Now we're getting somewhere. Go on."

Don slumped his shoulders and tried to look as defeated as he could, using his body language to convince the man of his sincerity while he tried to relieve the pressure on what he was sure was a cracked rib. "I dropped him off for a meeting with someone at Cal State Long Beach before coming here." Right city, wrong college. When they were making up cover stories while hunting fugitives, Cooper had always said that a lie that was half true was the most likely to be believed. He just hoped it worked here.

"Who?"

"I don't know." Sensing movement on his left, he cringed away and insisted, "I swear, I don't. Some professor in the math department, that's all I know."

There was a long pause. Then Ramos stood up. "Tom, go check it out. Take this with you," and he held out the scrap of paper with Charlie's number on it. "Keep trying to get a hold of him. Bring him back here when you find him."

The guy who'd been standing over him gave him one more cuff on the side of the head before heading towards the door. He paused and asked Ramos something that Don didn't quite hear. With a sideways glance at Don, the Customs agent stepped out into the hallway and shut the door. He could hear the low tone of their conversation, but not the individual words.

Ignoring the pain in his side, he immediately started looking around for some way out. The handcuff key was still in his pocket, and he twisted around until he could feel the cuffs slicing into his skin and the pain from his ribs was enough to make him want to scream. But it was no good. He would have to get his arms out from behind the chair. Unfortunately, the back of the chair was too large for him to lift his arms around it, and he dropped his head against the back in frustration.

When he'd first entered the room, he'd noticed that the upper foot or so of the walls was glass, but he had figured that since the whole building was controlled by Ramos's men, that was a useless piece of information. But a movement up to the right caught his eye. He turned his head, and what he saw made him shake his head to make sure his vision wasn't completely going. Sure enough, a familiar curly head was peeking above the wall, and Charlie was peering at him worriedly through the glass.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he wanted to shout, but he settled for mouthing the words instead. All this time he had been taking punches and blows to keep his brother safe, and the idiot was right in the next room. If Ramos found out…

The only response Charlie made was to hold up his wrist, tap the face of his watch, and hold up two fingers.

Don opened his mouth to start a reply, but snapped it shut as he heard the doorknob turn. He saw Charlie's head disappear from view as the door opened, and he turned towards the doorway as his interrogator entered the room again.

He started with a question to distract Ramos from where he'd been looking. "So, since I've given you some information, how about filling me in?"

The Customs agent chuckled. "This is the part where the villain tells the hero his plans right before the rescue, right?" He shook his head. "You haven't told me anything yet. What about the other location you mentioned on the phone, the one in L.A.? Do you have a team headed there?"

Don lifted his chin. "As we speak."

"Really. Because I just spoke to my men there, and there's no sign of the FBI. You don't suppose they got lost, do you?"

Crap. "I was supposed to meet them there. I thought they were going to go ahead without me, but I guess – "

The sound of Ramos's hand slamming down on the table was like a gunshot. "You are lying to me, Agent Eppes. Which makes me wonder if you're lying about other things, too. "

"I don't know what you're talking about." He kept his expression impassive.

"Where is your brother?"

"I told you, he's at Cal State – "

The other man drew his gun and leveled it between Don's eyes. "Where is he?"

Don swallowed. He couldn't very well say the truth, but he could say the truth as he knew it when the question was first asked. "All right, it wasn't Cal State I brought him to, it was City College just down the street."

Ramos nodded with a satisfied expression. Then he called over his shoulder, "You got that?"

Tom's face appeared in the doorway as he said, "Got it. I'll be right back."

Don said hurriedly, "Wait! Look, I can tell you whatever you want to know. You don't need to bring him into this."

"Right, like you've told me anything useful so far." Ramos shook his head. "Something tells me a mathematician will be a lot more pliable than an FBI agent."

He let the fear that he had been restraining so far creep onto his face. If they thought he really was afraid of them staking out the college, Charlie would be safe next door until the cavalry had arrived. Which should be any minute now, assuming that's what the gesturing at his watch had indicated. And it wasn't too hard to conjure up terror at the thought of Charlie falling into the hands of these men.

"What do you want to know?" he asked quietly, dropping his gaze to the table in front of him.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ramos lowering his gun. "Tell me how you knew to come here."

"We figured out there must have been a stockpile. The only question was where." Don kept talking, spinning out the few details he knew of how Charlie had figured out the location of the missing freon. All the while, he was straining his ears for any unusual sounds from outside, anything that would indicate his team had arrived. Surely it had been two minutes by now.

"When is your team really supposed to be at the other site?"

Don hesitated. If he told Ramos, and he contacted someone else to start moving that stockpile, it would be much harder to catch all of the smugglers. But the other man was saying, "You told me on the phone to wait till evening. Is that still the plan?"

Before he could say anything, there were shouts from outside. Thank God. Ramos took a step back, looking down the hallway towards the loading dock. Don could faintly hear, "FBI! Put your hands up!" coming from that direction.

The Customs officer whirled towards Don with a furious expression as he swiftly raised his gun. "You said you didn't tell anyone else. How did they know?"

"I don't know." Of course, he could guess, but he couldn't wait to hear from Charlie how he had managed to call the FBI and get into the building without being noticed. Right after he chewed him out for being here in the first place.

Staring down the barrel of the gun aimed at him, he reminded himself that he wasn't exactly out of the woods yet. "Give it up, Ramos. It's too late. You knew it had to happen at some point. Just put the gun down."

The other man's lips curled into a sneer. "If it's too late for me, it's too late for you." And he cocked the gun.

"No!" came Charlie's muffled cry through the glass partition.

The unexpected sound distracted Ramos as he pulled the trigger, and Don threw himself backwards, tucking his head forward so the back of it didn't connect with the floor as he went crashing down. He landed heavily on his cuffed hands, letting out a sharp cry as he felt something snap in his wrist. The thud of the bullet into the wall behind where he'd been sitting told him how close that had been. He only hoped that Ramos had run out of time to take another shot, because he was unlikely to be able to escape the next one so easily.

"FBI! Do not move!" Terry's commanding voice echoed in the narrow hallway, and Don allowed himself to close his eyes in relief from his crumpled position on the floor. At last, it was over. Now all he had to worry about was the pain in his wrist, which was competing with the pain in his side, while his head injury was reasserting itself via a nearly blinding headache. He rested his head against the cold tile floor for just a moment, just to gather his strength, he told himself.

A few seconds later, Terry was kneeling next to him, holstering her weapon. "Don, are you okay?" Her gentle hands were running over his arms, and he winced as she came into contact with his wrist.

"I think so." He shook his head, but this time the blurring at the corners of his vision didn't go away. "Where's Charlie?"

"Charlie? He called me from the college, and I told him to wait there." She was digging into her pocket, and produced a handcuff key.

"No, no." He shook his head, drawing in a sharp breath at the dizziness it brought. "He's here. He's right next door."

He heard the click of the handcuffs being released, and then Terry was helping him untangle himself from the wreck of the office chair and come to a sitting position. "I'm sure he wouldn't – "

"Don!" He looked up in time to see Ramos being dragged away, and then his brother appeared in the doorway, worry and fear written all over his face. "Don, are you okay?"

"Charlie, what the hell are you doing here?" Terry snapped in a tone that took Don aback.

Charlie stopped short. Then his expression turned apologetic, and he came forward, saying, "I couldn't just wait outside, so I thought I'd look around and see if I could learn anything that might be useful when you got here. But then they locked the door behind me, and I couldn't get out."

Don blinked. "Wait, so when he called you just now, you were right next door?" When Charlie nodded sheepishly, he felt a flash of anger. "My God, Charlie, what were you thinking? These guys were looking for you, and if they found you they were going to kill you. Do you understand that? And here you were sneaking around practically asking to get caught. Damn it, if you weren't…" Then the rush of adrenaline that had been sustaining him for the last fifteen minutes suddenly left, and he sagged back against the leg of the table, fighting the blackness that was seeping in at the edge of his vision.

"I'm sorry," he heard Charlie reply in a small voice. But he was too tired to be angry anymore, and he closed his eyes.

Terry said sharply, "Don?" He felt her hand squeeze his good wrist, and he tried to squeeze back as best he could. "Charlie, there's a medic outside," she said calmly. "Bring him in here, please. Now." He faintly heard footsteps quickly retreating, and then Terry was lightly slapping his face. "Come on, Don, stay with me."

He shook his head slowly. "Safe now," he murmured. Charlie was safe now, and he could rest.

Terry's voice grew more insistent. "You're not safe yet, Don. You need to stay awake so the paramedics can take a look at you." He felt her gentle fingers probing the back of his head, and he winced at the same time she drew in a sharp breath as her fingers encountered the sticky bump. "Don, when did this happen?"

His eyelids were growing heavier, and he muttered something about wanting to sleep. Terry's voice grew fainter as it grew more urgent, but finally he succumbed to the blackness.


	12. Chapter 12

Disclaimer in Part 1. Thanks again to N. for help with the math, to Elaine for help with the medical stuff, and Susan for help with everything.

There's still an epilogue after this, but I promise you've read the last cliffhanger! (But hopefully I haven't read the last reviews…)

ooooooooooooooooo

Chapter 12  
Saturday, July 2  
10:15 A.M.  
Long Beach Memorial Medical Center

"Excuse me, ma'am, but you can't go in there."

Karen looked up from the door to Room 312, her hand poised to knock. "I'm sorry?"

A short strawberry-blond woman was hurrying up to her, displaying an FBI badge. "No unauthorized personnel are allowed inside."

She took a step back, momentarily confused. Then she realized what was going on, and her heart sank. If there was a guard outside Don's door, then his case must be serious indeed. "Um, an Agent Lake called me this morning. My name is Karen Fisher. I'm a friend of Don's."

"Oh! Can I see your identification?" The woman looked over her driver's license before holding out her hand. "That would be me. It's nice to meet you."

She briefly shook her hand and said, "Thanks for calling, Agent Lake. How is he?"

"Please, call me Terry." The FBI agent gestured towards the hallway, and Karen felt a strange sense of role reversal. Usually she was the one suggesting a walk in order to deliver news about a loved one's health. "Like I told you on the phone, he'll be fine. He has a mild concussion, a cracked rib, and his left wrist is broken. The doctor wanted to hold him overnight for observation, but he said he should be free to go after one more examination later this morning."

She let out a relieved breath. "That's good." She didn't really want to think about how Don might have gotten those injuries, and she somehow doubted the other woman would tell her even if she did ask.

Terry went on as they slowly strolled along, "I'm sorry, I probably should have called you yesterday evening, but we weren't sure how serious his condition was, and how dangerous the situation might be." She must have seen Karen's worried expression, because she hurried on, "Everything's under control, but there's one or two perpetrators still unaccounted for, so we're just checking to make sure no one's here who shouldn't be."

"I understand. I appreciate you getting in touch with me. I mean, it's not like…" she trailed off, uncertain how to phrase what she meant. "We've only gone on a couple of dates, you know."

Terry came to a stop and regarded her for a moment. "Dr. Fisher, I've been friends with Don for a long time. He's very much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy. From what he's said about you in the past few weeks…let's just say I think he'll be glad to see you."

She was surprised to feel a flush on her cheeks, and she quickly looked away. "Thanks."

"So, um, his family is talking to him right now, but I can let him know you're here, if you like."

"That would be great. Thank you."

With a brief touch on her arm, Terry moved away and knocked on the door of Room 312 before entering. Karen heard the rise and fall of Don's voice as the door opened and closed. "…Charlie, I feel fine. I know that what you saw looked bad, but really, the doctor said…"

She waited, resisting the nervous impulse to fidget with the small cross around her neck. She didn't want to walk into the middle of a family argument; that was awkward enough when it was one of her patients, much less a…well, whatever Don was to her.

The phone call this morning had sent her heart racing as soon as the woman said she was Don's partner. She hadn't seen him since their lunch date last week, and though they'd talked on the phone once or twice, she hadn't had the impression that he was at a dangerous stage in his case. Her first thought was to wonder how Agent Lake knew who she was and how she had found her, but then she reminded herself that the woman was with the FBI, after all. Then she'd realized the implications of the call, and she'd really started worrying. Granted, Don's family members would have been notified right away, but she was still picturing all sorts of horrible things that had happened to him. Then she was told that Don was okay, but that he had been hospitalized, and that a visit from her might be appreciated. Still, until she saw him with her own eyes, she knew her imagination would be running away with her.

The door opened again, and Terry stuck her head out. "Come on in," she said with a friendly smile. Karen took a deep breath before walking in, not sure if she was bracing herself for familial tension, or what Don's appearance would be.

Inside, an older man sitting next to the head of the bed was shaking his head and saying, "Just a concussion? I know you have a thick head, Donnie, but please. You have two broken bones and your face looks awful."

"Dad, my rib is just cracked, and thanks for the pick-me-up." He was about to say more, but then he caught sight of her, and his eyes lit up. "Hey."

She took a step forward, managing not to flinch as she saw the bruises that nearly covered his face. "Hi. Um, your partner called me this morning and told me you were here, but if this is a bad time –"

"No, no, come in." Don leaned forward a bit and adjusted the pillows behind him so he was sitting up straight. "Dad, Charlie, this is Karen Fisher. Karen, this is my father, and my brother is back there slouching against the wall."

She turned to see a shorter, curly-haired man leaning against the back wall. His slightly haunted expression was replaced with a quick glare at his brother before he extended a hand to her. "Nice to meet you," he said softly.

"Likewise." Except for the hair, he was obviously Don's brother, with the same expressive brown eyes and serious demeanor. He looked tired; she wondered if the entire Eppes family had spent the night at the hospital.

She turned to Don's father, who had risen from his seat. "I'm Alan. It's very nice to meet you, Karen."

"You too, Mr. Eppes." She could see where Don had gotten his calm air of authority. Though lines of worry were evident on the older man's face, he projected an unruffled air that she found reassuring. It was too bad he wasn't a doctor, she thought. He would probably have a great bedside manner.

"Please, have a seat." Alan gestured to the chair next to Don's bed.

"Oh, no, it's okay," she replied.

"No, really, Charlie and I were just leaving. Time to get another cup of coffee."

Karen's glance took in the half-full styrofoam cup on the bedside table, and she saw that Don had noticed, too. But all he said was, "All right, Dad. Then as soon as the doctor comes by, I'm ready to get out of here, okay?"

"If that's what the doctor says." Alan hesitated a moment, then said, "All right, we're going to let you kids talk. Karen, it was nice to meet you."

"Same here." She lifted a hand in response to Charlie's wave as he followed his father out of the room. As he looked at his brother before leaving, something that looked like a trace of fear flashed over his face, so quickly that she thought she had imagined it.

She turned to Don to see him watching his brother, his eyebrows slightly furrowed. When he saw her looking at him, he gave a slight shake of his head. "My brother. He's usually a lot more talkative than that. I think he worries about me too much."

"He's not the only one." Was it worrying too much when she realized that the knots in her stomach from Terry's call had only started to loosen a moment ago when she saw Don alive and well, if battered?

He grimaced. "I told Terry she didn't have to call you. Not that I'm not glad you're here, 'cause I am, but I thought you might be a little worried if you got a phone call out of the blue."

She shrugged one shoulder and looked down, not wanting him to see the worry in her eyes that she suddenly felt silly for having, given all of the dire scenarios that had been racing through her head. True, he looked pretty uncomfortable, but it wasn't life-threatening. "I'm just glad you're okay."

"Yeah, well, it was nothing serious." His eyes followed hers as they flickered to the cast on his left wrist before moving back to the bruises that marred his handsome face.

"Then I'd hate to see serious." She tried to give a short laugh, but it stuck in her throat.

His brown eyes were somber. "Karen, are you all right?"

She wanted to say that she was the one who should be asking that question, but then she caught his double meaning. This was normal, he was saying. Maybe not the hospitalization, but the physical danger of his job. She remembered him telling her that his job had more risks than the average person, but that he was better prepared to handle them. She wondered what had gone wrong yesterday. And she wondered if, as he was asking, she was okay with those risks herself.

"May I?" she asked, gesturing towards the chart on a clipboard at the foot of the bed. It really wasn't any of her business, but she was curious as to what he would say.

He searched her eyes for a moment. Then he nodded. "It's not, strictly speaking, confidential information, but it would be better if you kept it to yourself."

"I'm a doctor. I know all about confidential," she threw over her shoulder as she rose and reached for the chart.

She flipped through the pages, reading that although he had been unconscious on arrival, he had been revived easily and had shown no signs of anything more than a mild concussion. His wrist had broken cleanly, so it should heal fairly easily within four weeks or so. The bruising on his lower back was indicative of a severe blow, but tests showed no damage to his kidneys. The cracked rib would keep him at his desk for at least a month or so, assuming he followed doctor's orders. She was aware of him watching her as she read, and so it was a struggle to keep her face impassive as she read about the multiple lacerations and contusions on his wrists, implying that he'd been restrained with handcuffs while he was being beaten.

His voice broke into her increasingly dark thoughts. "So can I tell my dad that a second opinion says I'm good to go?"

She looked up at him, aware that the emotions on her face were probably visible to him. "Looks like you had a rough time of it," she said quietly.

The hopeful expression on his face faded. "Yeah," he responded, something flickering in his eyes before he looked away. "You could say that."

"How are you feeling now?"

"I feel fine," he grumbled, picking at the edge of the blanket.

"Oh, I see. You're one of those tough guys, huh?" He hadn't received anything more than the mildest pain medication, according to his chart.

He snorted and met her gaze. "All right, it hurts, okay? Look, I know I'm stuck on my rear at home for the next two weeks while my head stops ringing, and that I'm out of the field for at least four weeks after that before my wrist and rib are healed. Believe me, I'm not some kind of macho idiot who's going to risk myself and my team because my body isn't well enough to do what I tell it to. Give me some credit here."

Somehow she knew that was the answer he would give. From the moment she met him, she'd never doubted his competence at his job, including knowing what his limitations were. "Well, there's obviously nothing wrong with your spirits," she teased gently as she slid the chart back into its holder, relieved at his reply.

He sat back against the pillows. "I'm sorry."

"No, it's okay. Better to yell at someone who's used to it than at your family. Your brother looks like he's heard enough already."

Don's gaze turned as haunted as Charlie's for a split second before he quickly looked away. Then she recalled the words she'd heard earlier from the hallway, and a light bulb went on. Her hand flew to her mouth. Charlie knew what had happened to Don. He wasn't just worried over his brother being injured. He had seen it happen.

She swallowed. "Is your brother okay?" she asked softly as she sat back down in the chair. "He wasn't hurt, was he?"

"Yeah, he's fine." Don's expression was puzzled as he turned to face her. He must have seen her wide eyes, because his face took on a thoughtful expression. "He's fine," he repeated slowly. "You angling for a job with the FBI or something?"

The corner of her mouth turned up. "I'm just trying to understand what's going on," she replied. "And I know – " she held up a hand to forestall him – "I know you can't tell me everything. But that doesn't mean I can turn off the part of my brain that's going to be thinking about it. I'm pretty good at piecing things together, you know."

"Well, that's something you've got something in common with my brother. I learned pretty fast to watch what I say around him, that's for sure." Then he turned serious again, his eyes holding hers. "But it's not easy for either of us. Karen, I gotta let you know this. The past two weeks are actually pretty typical. It can be hard to know that something's going on with me without knowing any of the details. Just ask my dad, or Charlie. Some people aren't good at dealing with worrying too much because they don't know what's going on."

She understood perfectly well what he was saying. She'd been wondering about this all the way over here, knowing full well that this might not be the last time she saw Don bruised and battered in a hospital bed, and that next time it could well be more serious. And it didn't matter that she felt torn between wanting and not wanting to know what had happened to him, because she would probably never find out. There would always be that little bit of distance between them because of the things he could never talk about, no matter how close they got.

But as she had said a few minutes ago, she was familiar with the strictures of confidentiality herself. And it seemed like a small price to pay for getting to know as considerate and caring and attractive a man as Don Eppes was turning out to be. So she reached out to take his hand as she said lightly, "You're not trying to get out of our bet, are you?"

He stared at her for a moment before throwing his head back and dissolving into laughter. She chuckled along with him, resolving to do whatever she could to make him laugh as often as possible. She somehow got the feeling he didn't do so nearly as often as he should.

Besides, if he was gorgeous when he smiled, he was absolutely incredible when he laughed.

"Well, in that case, Dr. Fisher, are you free on Thursday the 14th? I happen to know it's a seven o'clock game, and there were still tickets available as of yesterday morning."

"Are you sure you can be up and around by then? That's less than two weeks from now."

He rolled his eyes. "I can sit in a seat at Dodger Stadium as well as I can sit on the couch. Besides, I already checked. It's All-Star Poster giveaway night."

"Oh, well, in that case." She grinned back at him. "I'll be there."

They fell silent and looked at each other for a long moment, the tension in the room suddenly gone. Then he laced his fingers through hers, and she looked down for a moment, her eyes drawn to the angry red scratches across the back of his wrist. She spoke quietly, looking into his eyes so he would know she meant it. "Don, I know what you're saying, and I'm not trying to make light of it. That's why I asked you the other night about your job. I want to know what I'm getting into, and now I think I have a much better idea."

He didn't reply, just briefly looked down at their intertwined hands resting on the edge of the bed before returning his gaze to hers. She went on, "I know you take a lot of risks in your job. But I'm glad for it. Because I also know that if it weren't for you taking those risks, and being so good at what you do, I probably wouldn't be here. I mean, I owe you my life. If it weren't for you…"

Don was shaking his head. "It was a whole team of people working to protect you, Karen, not just me."

"That's not what your Agent Cooper said afterwards. He told me he'd hardly ever seen you putting so much into a case, even when the two of you were chasing fugitives across the country."

As he looked away, it almost looked like he was blushing, but it must have been a trick of the light. "Aw, that's just Coop. He kept teasing me about you all during the case."

Now that was interesting. Either this Agent Cooper had been way off, or Don had a very good poker face. She'd never seen a flicker of interest from him until their lunch meeting that turned into a two-hour conversation. She had chalked up his attempts to make her feel better after McDowd's apprehension as just part of his job, but now she was wondering. "Did he now?"

He fixed her with that same intense look he'd given her in the restaurant on Olvera Street, and he gently tugged on her hand. "Let's just say I'm glad I ran into you that day in the office."

Her heart was pounding again, but not from worry. "So am I," she said softly, leaning forward a little bit.

And as she was starting to learn was typical for her Agent Eppes, he met her halfway.


	13. Epilogue

Once more, with feeling: disclaimer and beta thanks are in Chapter 1.

Thank you all so very much for your reviews; I really, really appreciate them. They definitely encourage me to write more. So (hint, hint), you've got one final chance at the end of this chapter…

Thanks for reading! Hooray for Season Two!

ooooooooooooooooo

Epilogue  
Thursday, July 14  
6:35 P.M.  
Dodger Stadium

Don leaned back against the concrete pillar and scanned the approaching fans. He'd arranged to meet Karen here outside the park to have at least a few minutes alone with her. Not that he wasn't looking forward to having her really meet his family instead of just shaking hands with them in his hospital room, but it had been too long since he'd seen her.

The corner of his mouth quirked up as he thought of what Coop would say about that. Probably something like, "If three days is too long, Eppes, you've got it _bad_." They'd had lunch on Monday after his checkup at the hospital, since Karen wanted to know all the details of his recovery. She was pleased to hear that he was coming along just fine, that his wrist and rib were nearly mended, and that since his head had shown no signs of anything more serious than the initial diagnosis of a mild concussion, he was free to go back to work after less than two weeks away.

He'd never been so glad to see his desk as he was Tuesday morning. Dad and Charlie had insisted he stay with them during his convalescence so they could keep an eye on him, and he was about ready to kill them after two weeks of their constant hovering. But he kept his temper in check, knowing that Charlie was still working through his guilt about having to stand by and watch what happened to his big brother. Terry had talked to Charlie and gotten him to explain why he had thought it was a good idea to sneak into the place where Don was being held captive, instead of the bone-headed idea that she (and Don) thought it was. He'd explained that he couldn't just stand by and do nothing, and he hadn't expected to be caught inside like he was. He swore that he'd never do something like that again, and she believed him.

So did Don, after having his own conversation with him. To Charlie's credit, he hadn't retreated into the garage or his office in response to Don's injuries, but it did take about a week for him to stop avoiding Don as much as was possible within the confines of the house. When Don finally cornered him late one night after Alan had gone to bed, a torrent of guilt came pouring out. All of the time he had been in the office next door, he had been not only watching what was happening to his brother, but realizing that it was for his own protection. And the thought of what could have happened nearly made him sick.

"I guess I never fully understood what that part of your job meant," he'd said quietly, turning a pencil over and over in his hands. "I mean, I understood it here, you know," and he tapped his temple. "But it's like when I ran all the numbers on the Charm School Boys, and I ran the numbers on the sniper, and I obviously still had no freaking clue of what either one meant until I actually saw it happen. And that all went by so fast; it was possible to absorb the new data and just move on." He had lifted his head and fixed Don with a steady look. "I never understood what it meant to give of yourself like that to the point where you're literally risking your life to protect someone else."

"Charlie…" Don had tried to think of how best to word what he wanted to say. He had finally decided that beating around the bush was not the way to go. "A lot of it was stalling for time, you know. It's not like they were going to let me go anyway."

He remembered how Charlie's face had gone white, and for a moment he thought he had completely said the wrong thing. Then his brother took a deep breath and said, "I know. But if you weren't as strong as you are, Don, they would have found me, too."

He had looked away then, saying, "C'mon, Charlie, don't tell me you wouldn't do the same thing for me."

Charlie had waited until he was looking at him again before replying, "I don't know if I could. But I sure would try."

They had continued to talk for a while until a huge yawn nearly split Don's jaw. Charlie had insisted that he go to bed, since he was still recovering from his injuries. But the slight tension that had existed in the Eppes household was gone after that.

On the other hand, it meant that Charlie began hovering as much as Alan was, to the point that Don had to call Terry one evening to get him out of there for a few hours on the pretext of an update on the smuggling case. She had agreed, amused, and spent a couple of hours with him at the local coffeeshop telling him about the huge number of arrests that had followed Jason Ramos's capture. Unbound to either the Russian or Japanese mafias by family ties, he had been more willing to cooperate than Don would have expected. Of course, it was going to cost the FBI a lot to keep him in protective custody before, during, and after the many trials that would result from the case, but that was part of the job.

The sum of the stockpile that Don had stumbled over plus the one later found at the Los Angeles site on Charlie's map accounted for all but 2 percent of the freon the mathematician had calculated as "missing." Terry was confident that more careful tracking in cooperation with the legitimate customs officials would turn up the rest. It turned out there were only three other customs officers in on the smuggling besides the ones Don had encountered. Also, they had eventually tracked down the remaining ten smugglers from Mick's original list, plus a handful more from Ramos's information.

Of course, they weren't going to be able to shut down the _yakuza_ or _volki_ completely, despite the wealth of material they had been able to gather. But Terry was confident that this particular smuggling ring was defunct, and that their information would help the FBI stop other freon operations across the country. He had asked her about Mick, and she had explained that the Ukrainian refused to go into witness protection, saying that he enjoyed his life in California too much to be transferred to some place like Topeka or Kalamazoo. Besides, he said, his accent would make him stand out no matter where he was. He'd always be looking over his shoulder, and he'd be happier looking over said shoulder if there was a California girl next to it. When Don asked if she qualified as a "California girl," or if Mick had expressed any interest in his own personal FBI protection, she'd quickly changed the subject.

Don was distracted from his ruminations by the sight of a tall woman making her way towards him through the crowd. As she got closer, he folded his arms across his chest and pulled his Dodgers cap more firmly over his head, shaking his head in disapproval. "Do I know you?" he called out as she approached.

She spread her arms wide and twirled around, displaying her Giants jersey with "Bonds" across the back. "You got a problem, Agent Eppes?" she asked.

He came closer and tapped her brown baseball cap. "You've got a lot of nerve showing up here dressed like that."

"I'm a pretty brave woman," she replied, moving towards him and putting her arms around his neck.

"Forward, too," he murmured, bending down to meet her for a long kiss. When they drew apart, he gave her a broad grin. "I like that."

She returned the smile, if a bit more coyly. "Are you sure _you_ know what you're getting into here?"

He laughed, delighted at her attitude. "Karen, you are back!"

She cocked her head inquisitively. "What do you mean?"

"You," he said, giving her a small peck. "You're the Dr. Fisher I met in your office again. The one who wouldn't put her life and her patients on hold for some escaped convict until I could absolutely prove to her that she had to. The one who kept herself together in a pretty dangerous situation and managed to show more concern for others than herself at the end of it. That's what I mean."

Her cheeks turned slightly pink. "The one who had a handsome FBI agent watching out for her at every turn, including talking her down from being afraid of her own shadow?"

"Hey now, you were never that bad." His arms were still around her waist, and he gently rubbed her lower back. "Just needed someone to talk to."

"I'm still grateful to you for that. And not just because of what's followed after it," she said meaningfully.

He shrugged one shoulder and gave her a quick kiss. "Glad I could help."

"So how are you feeling?" she asked as they disentangled themselves and started walking into the stadium.

"Fine," he replied. "The cast is ready to come off in a few days, and my rib hasn't hurt for about a week now."

"How long until you're cleared for fieldwork?"

"Still several more weeks. But at least I'm back at the office."

"Always on duty, aren't you?"

"If it means being out of the house, yes." He handed over his ticket before following Karen through the turnstiles. "Let's just say I'm glad Dad and Charlie are going to have someone else to talk to today besides me. That way they won't keep asking me every five minutes how I'm feeling."

Her hand flew to her mouth. "I'm sorry! Here I am, nagging you too."

"Asking once is not nagging. Asking once an hour would be a problem."

"Got it." She slipped her hand into his as they walked along the concourse towards their seats. "So who's the starting pitcher?"

"Brad Penny. The Giants are toast. I hope you didn't have your heart set on doing anything this weekend, because you are so going to lose our bet." He swung their clasped hands between them, the gentle gesture belying his tough words.

"We'll see," was all she said.

oooooooooooooooo

Two hours later, he was worried that she was right. Karen had been delighted to find that the row in front of them was occupied by a family of five who had come down from San Francisco for the game, and their little cheering section had plenty to cheer about. Each team had scored a run early on, but then after a series of errors in the seventh inning, the Giants were up by three.

But now, the Dodgers had scored two runs in the bottom of the seventh, and were on their way to tying it up. The announcer's voice rang out, "Now batting for the Dodgers, number nine, Jason Phillips!"

"All right! Come on, Phillips!" Alan shouted. "Hit it out of here!"

"Yeah, he's due for it," Don said, cocking an ear to hear Charlie's inevitable reply.

Karen spoke up. "You know that statistically speaking, there's no such thing as being 'due' for a hit."

Don stared at her, then at Charlie, sitting on her other side. He and Alan were both looking at Karen, who suddenly seemed a bit flustered. "Did I say something wrong?" she asked, looking back and forth between the Eppes men.

Charlie broke into a grin. "Not at all, Karen. Not at all."

"I mean, the odds of a batter getting a hit only depend on their batting average, not how many at-bats it's been since they last got on base," she went on.

"It's a common misperception," Charlie agreed, shooting a quick glance at Don.

"Hey, sometimes it works," he said defensively. "What about me calling that home run? Remember that, Charlie?"

There was a gleam in his brother's eye that he didn't like. "That's a good example, Don. Let me explain this to Karen." He turned in his seat to face her. "So last fall we're all at home, watching a game on TV, and Don said that the batter was due for a hit. I tried to explain very logically that it can be mathematically shown that there's no such thing as being 'due,' in a similar manner to what you just did."

"And what happened?"

"He hit it out of the park." Don leaned forward and propped his elbow on his thigh. "Numbers aren't everything, Charlie. Take it from an old pro. Baseball is about intuition."

The roar from the crowd distracted them, and Don looked up to see the ball bouncing into the outfield stands, and Jason Phillips standing on second base with a ground-rule double. "All right!" he shouted, clapping with the rest of the fans. "Told you he was due," he said, nudging Karen's shoulder.

"We're still ahead," she said confidently. "I guess sometimes you just get lucky."

"Wait, I haven't finished." That gleam was still in Charlie's eye, and Don shifted in his seat nervously. "I happened to see the box score the next day. And it momentarily confused me, because it said no Dodger had hit a home run. So I looked at the previous day's box score, and lo and behold, there was a home run by Green in the fifth inning. When I got home, I found the tape still in the VCR. Don wasn't using his intuition, he was using his memory."

Karen turned to look at him, mock disapproval on her face. "Don, shame on you, tricking your brother like that."

"It was Dad's idea," Don said quickly.

"Oh, sure, blame the old man!" Alan shook his head and looked at Karen. "You try to raise them right," he said in a long-suffering voice.

She giggled, and Don instantly forgave Charlie for telling his embarrassing story. But he still asked in an injured tone, "What, like you never tried to trick your sister?"

She sat back and folded her arms across her chest. "I'm the younger sibling," she said primly. "I was only defending myself."

"Tell me about it!" Charlie's voice grew more animated. "There was this one time when Don…"

He groaned and leaned back, looking at his father over Karen and Charlie's heads. Karen had rested her hand on his leg as she continued her conversation with Charlie, but Don still gave his father a put-upon look. Alan's response was a brief look at Karen, and a warm, approving smile at Don. He felt his mouth curve into an answering smile, and he lifted his arm to drape it over her shoulder. She gave him a briefly surprised look before returning her attention to Charlie, but snuggled a little closer under the shelter of his arm as she did so.

He almost didn't mind when the next batter struck out, and the inning was over. And after Charlie gave him an approving look that matched their father's, and Karen leaned her head on his shoulder to watch the remaining two innings, he _almost_ didn't mind that there were no further runs scored: final score Giants 4, Dodgers 3.

Almost.

oooooooooooooooo

(pssst) This would be that final chance I mentioned…while you're full of warm and fuzzy feelings, please leave a review. Thanks!


End file.
